innagoddadadamdavegan

Brother, Can You Spare a Tofutti Cutie?

2012-01-15T14:31:00.000-08:00

New Year’s Resolutions

Along with eating healthier and getting more exercise, here are some of my New Year’s resolutions:

1) Stop being apocalyptic. Stop expecting America to experience a crisis that “wakes” people up and changes everything. The American capitalist class has steadily ground down the working class majority since the early 1970s with no meaningful resistance and there’s no apparent reason this can’t continue indefinitely. Things don’t magically get better just because they’ve been lousy for a long time.

Git along, little sheeples, nothing to see here: thirty million Americans under or unemployed, 50 million with no health insurance, 47 million on food stamps, declining real wages and leisure time for almost 40 years, full speed ahead with illegal wars and robotic warfare, the slow strangling of prudent savers to give money to speculators (through prolonged artificially low interest rates), indefinite detention and assassinations of American citizens, immunity from prosecution (or even any investigation) for government-approved criminals -- from CIA torturers to spying telecom companies to Wall Street fraudsters, and the ongoing flash crash back to feudalism from trillions of dollars stolen in tech, housing, commodity and credit bubbles. If it walks like a crisis and quacks like a crisis but people don’t treat it like it’s a crisis, then it’s not a crisis. Through it all, no one of any import stands up and screams, “That duck has no clothes!” And there’s still no Million Gun March on Washington.

2) Look on the bright side of America’s closeness to Israel. The Great and Little Satan are arm in arm and jumping off a cliff together -- they are happy and we should be happy for them. Clarity is always good. The latest outrageous act committed by an Israeli settler automatically becomes the baseline that will be defended by every American politician. Countries that confuse their interests with other nations are the Fool walking off the mountain in the Tarot card deck. Buh-bye! Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians also flushes out all those closet Custers on the American left. People who deny justice for victims of a land and water stealing ethnic cleansing project will always undermine (or walk away from) any movement for peace or justice -- they are neo-cons in waiting.

America’s right wing doesn’t see the Israeli/Palestinian “issue” through the Nazi genocide portal so much as through the Native American genocide portal: they are cheering on the cowboys and cavalry. While they are having their masturbatory massacre fantasies of dark-skinned people, it’s good that the rest of the world sees America’s first black president warmly embrace the Bull Conner of the Middle East -- it’s a reminder that America can never be trusted and that America’s foreign policy is mainly a play thing used by politicians to get elected. Support of Israel is America’s warning label, a skull and crossbones that says America doesn’t mean anything it says about freedom, equality, democracy, or one person one vote. “Separate and unequal, segregation now and forever!” says Barack Obama, where it concerns Palestinians.

3) Stop listening to people who talk about the “1% versus the 99%.” This phrase must have been thought up by someone who believes capitalism is basically good but some miscellaneous fiends just ruined it for everybody with their “cronyism” etc. They never tell us how the capitalist class got such a crushing financial advantage to begin with. Here’s the answer: They got all this money by stealing it from you at work each day where you are paid only a tiny fraction of the vast wealth that you help create. The capitalists siphon off the surplus booty for their opulent lifestyles plus assorted payoffs to the other purposeless parasites and anti-evolutionary freaks that comprise the tax, insurance, real estate, advertising and public relations industries. And don’t forget about the petty cash to bribe United States Senators. You work and pay for all of it, including your own enslavement. If you understand and believe this, you are now a Marxist -- that didn’t hurt, did it? The problem isn’t the 1%, it’s 100% the capitalist system because it’s based on theft.

Other reasons to reject the “1% versus the 99%”: First, if we look at the people who respond to the “bread” component of the American empire’s bread and circuses, we find that millions are doing perfectly fine and feel they have way too much to lose by any change in the current system. On the “circuses” side of the equation there are plenty of people content with blaming their problems on immigrants and minorities and glorying in the spectacle of killing the latest Muslim villain of the month. ( In Obamaville there are only two street signs and they both point in the same re-election direction: Dow Jones Green, Muslims Blood Red -- it’s kind of a Christmassy-type intersection.) And if we add in all the members of the working class who either are ignorant of their own class interests or actually aspire to be members of the capitalist class, we might find that the percentage of “us” versus “them” doesn’t look so favorable.

Instead, I urge a different kind of percentage to move the debate forward. I believe that America will start to turn around at the exact moment that the capitalist class becomes more afraid of the working class than we are of them. As soon as 51% of us performs this judo, America begins to get well. Working out the expression of losing our fear is the only real issue. The capitalist class hasn’t had to give back anything in nearly 40 years and nothing really significant since the Great Depression. The 1% versus 99% is meaningless -- 51% of the capitalist class being scared shitless for their lives is priceless.

4) Stay positive. No matter how bad things look for non-human animals and nature, one day Guyeah! (my version of Gaia) will prevail and that blight known as humanity will be gone or have to significantly (whimsically and ahimsacally) start over. O happy day!

If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to play a little Tetris. You don’t have any Tofutti Cuties on ya, do ya?

published 12/30/2011 at counterpunch.org

The Horseshit Whisperer Rides Again

2012-01-15T14:16:00.000-08:00

Pulling the Trigger on Trigger

The chief function of American presidents is to “break” unruly working class resistance to American capital whether in Middle Eastern deserts, Latin American jungles or the streets of Oakland and Cincinnati. Eight years of Bush/Cheney fear-training gave way to the current horse shit whisperer-in-chief whose vague soaring Rorschach rhetoric encourages his followers to believe they’re getting their own personal nods and winks about what he believes and what he’ll do if he just gets a “chance.” And, often, when he gets the chance, he’s worse than Bush. To wit:

Just in case my liberal Democrat animal-lovin’ friends missed it: last week Barack Humane Obama signed a bill legalizing horse slaughter for human consumption in the United States after it was outlawed six years ago, thus betraying his 2008 campaign pledge (yawn) to keep it illegal. With the stroke of a pen, Obama is responsible for killing more animals each year than Dick Cheney has killed in a lifetime.

Seventy percent of Americans wanted to keep horses off the menu but, in a flowering of demockracy -- genus venus americanus flytrapus -- the POTUS and the Congrossest kept their bipartisan unbeaten streak alive: the working class majority must never, ever get anything we want, no matter how tiny. Obama’s favorite movie is said to be “The Godfather” and, figuratively, he just put 200,000 horses’ heads each year into the beds and nightmares of anyone who cares about them. Hope and change you can tuck into. The particulars of this merciless outrage, including our old friend: private profit/socialized cost, can be found at Our Compass.

(Here’s some free advice for you Republican presidential yahoos: if you can put a pole ax in Obama’s hand and a thoroughbred horse on the other end of it, you’ll win the election. Poster: “Uncle Tom Obama wants YOU to go the knackers!” Remember all the letters congress received several decades ago when the military was gassing beagles? Give it a try, Mitt and Newt -- it only requires that, for once, you refrain from out-gooning Obama. You can’t excoriate Obama because he didn’t waterboard the horses before he killed them.)

Vegan nags like me point out that horses shouldn’t be eaten any more than cows, chickens, pigs, fish, deer, whales or humans. Others correctly say that American capitalism’s current Death-Mask-In-Chief murders Pakistani, Yemeni and Afghan children on a regular basis so why be surprised when he pulls the trigger on Trigger.

So why is Obama’s marching of Mr. Ed into the terror and cruelty of the slaughterhouse any more irritating than numerous other things he does? It probably has to do with how hard it is to get minimal protections for non-human animals enacted and the fact that he keeps pretending, just like his liberal supporters keep pretending, that he and they are some kind of superior enlightened humane beings wholly unlike their barbarous right wing opponents who we’re supposed to be petrified of. It’s the liberals who shop around for both “humane meat” and “humanitarian” “good wars” and other oxymorons -- and that grates. The lack of revolutionary class/vegan-conciousness among people on the left -- revealing their cowardice, shallowness, hypocrisy and stupidity, and the attachment they have to failure -- is one of the biggest impediments to anything positive happening in America. What’s true of health is also true of ethics and revolution: you can’t buy it, you have to live it.

And now I have a special treat for you, an exclusive draft of a screenplay I’m sending to Pixar called “Barack O’Celery.”

White liberal child: Mommy, come quick and look in the refrigerator! The organic Barack O’Celery is spoiled! He’s all slimy.

White liberal mom: Oh I know, honey, and we paid so much for him -- what a waste. He was so fresh and healthy-looking when we bought him four years ago at the Whole Fools election market.

Child: Can we throw him out?

Mom: No, we’ll probably just keep him for another four years.

Child: Mommy, there’s some cockroaches having a sit-in on the lower shelf, protesting the Barack O’Celery and he just pepper sprayed them! Everything in the refrigerator is ruined.

Barack O’Celery: Will you two shut up and close the door! This doesn’t concern you! I’m trying to build a coalition of carrots, radishes and kohlrabi to attack some bok choy -- the security of this entire refrigerator depends on it!

Child (coughing): Mommy, he’s making a mess in there and the longer he hangs around, the whiter he gets.

Mom (coughing): God only knows what he’ll be like four years from now.

Child: Mommy, can we go riding today?

Mom: No, Barack O’Celery just killed your pony. I don’t know how he did it from inside the refrigerator -- he had to really go out of his way -- but he did it. Sorry, pumpkin.

Child (horrified): Liberal mommy, is that my dead pony wrapped up in the refrigerator?! I don’t think I can take four more years of Barack O’Celery! And you need to get the hell up out of here too!

published 12/9/2011 at counterpunch.org

Ain't No New Thing: Reflections On The Whitey House

2011-07-05T08:23:00.000-07:00

Gil Scott-Heron Dies at 62

The commanding voice that named the names, that directed a musical letter of rage (air mail special) to whitey on the moon, and lived to see a revolt (if not a revolution) televised from Egypt, has died. Gil Scott-Heron died Friday afternoon at age 62 in NYC’s St. Luke’s Hospital.

I don’t know what age I was when I first heard Scott-Heron wittily and boldly lambaste Nixon and Spearhead Agnew and Ronnie Raygun and Attilla the Haig and Marlin Perkins and Papa Doc Bush — they and their America didn’t mean shit to him (and me and millions of other Americans) and it felt damned good to hear it. One of his favorite targets was Americans’ greatest religious experience: getting something for nothing — specifically, the ripping off of black art, music and culture by (mostly) white capitalists while its creators often died paupers.

He declined the title of “Godfather of Rap” and it was easy to see why. I was blown away by NWA’s “Straight Outta Compton” the first couple weeks I listened to it — the anger, the violence, fighting back against racist cops, the clarity about who your enemies are, the cheapness of life worn like a badge. But I found that I couldn’t keep listening to it indefinitely — the music, especially, was both depressing and boring. And that’s what Gil Scott-Heron and his brilliant longtime collaborator Brian Jackson figured out: they created a poetic, free-flowing, typically flute and percussion-driven platform for Scott-Heron’s AK-47 mouth to artistically and scathingly say that America was a racist war-loving hypocritical slag heap, deluded by fake movies, fake history, fake images and fake media. Scott-Heron and the multi-instrumentalist Jackson fused and maxed out beat poetry and music to what they always should have been, with fabulous hypnotic grooves and the occasional tasty solo. Scott-Heron ra-ta-tatted against injustice, but you kept on listening, for decades, because the hooks and creativity are always present whether moving through funk, soul, R & B, free jazz, African or Caribbean beats. Drugs, violence, poverty, inequality, opportunistic “leaders” and sellouts, addiction, defeat and lives that never got off the ground were frequent subjects. But the really unforgivable sin was musical boredom.

In his prime, Scott-Heron shouted that the emperors were not only stark naked but stark raving mad. He had empathy for people struggling against addiction and poverty and whenever you have empathy — artistically, personally, politically — it will lead you to a better place. And this is another difference between Scott-Heron and many of the rappers he is alleged to have inspired. Empathy begat the anger. I dispute that most of the rappers I hear are angry — if they were, they would be totally revulsed by Barack Obama. How empathetic are Americans, in general, when they acquiesce to the nonstop killing of innocents all over the world– they may think they are angry or that their backs are against the wall but these are largely the cries of the alienated, unconnected and passive, satisfied as debt-slaves with iTrinkets and currently presided over by MC Obummer, an astounding master of, as it turns out, killing hope.

I saw Scott-Heron perform two years ago at the Tin Angel in Philadelphia. To see the creator of “Storm Music” and “The Bottle” perform in an intimate club was a thrill. He had a voice and presence that you paid attention to — his baritone was born to deliver Shakespeare, as bassist Ron Carter once said. He and his rockin’ pianist, blistering lefty lead player and the smoking rhythm section were so relentlessly good that I didn’t even miss my favorite song, “Storm Music,” or “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” The new songs, from “I’m New Here,” were instantly embraced. “The Bottle” swung mightily that night. And he was hilarious, both that night and on his recorded offhand pot shots against the ruling class, something that isn’t often noted when he’s written about.

That Philly show fell in a time period, the fall of 2009, where I also saw James McMurtry and Iris DeMent. Interestingly (maybe) is that Scott-Heron did not perform “The Revolution Will Not be Televised,” DeMent did not perform “Wasteland of the Free,” and McMurtry did not play “We Can’t Make It Here,” all absolutely classic songs pointedly critical of America. I’m sure these artists had different reasons for not playing these tunes but I took it as a bad omen. The impression it made on me was that now that the Big Bad Bush was gone it was time to STFU about America. It was time to start feeling good about America because an uncouth goon from Texas was replaced by a smooth-talking intelligent Wall Street stooge. Protest and anger were uncool. Nothing as pseudo-glorious as Reagan’s Morning (Thunder) in America but, rather, some weak-ass liberal Sleepytime tea time in America. Scott-Heron had also spoken favorably about Obama.

So, after two years of Obama, I muse: the working class of America, especially blacks, can get as much action on their concerns by sending a letter to whitey on the moon as they can from having America’s first black president in the White House.

In the jumbled world of confusing musicians with leaders, I thought about how Scott-Heron canceled a planned show in Israel in 2010 (why did he ever schedule it?) — persuaded by activists that it would be similar to playing in apartheid South Africa. One might imagine that Scott-Heron would be helping to lead a BDS movement instead of being confronted by it. But why should we expect musicians and celebrities to be more unaffected by capitalism than 99.9% of the rest of the population? His embrace of Obama perfectly symbolizes the personal and political decline and irrelevance of the left over the last 40 years. We didn’t just come a short way, baby. We went headlong the wrong way. O working class, we have to be constantly moving forward toward the overthrow of capitalism because when we cease to advance we will either die immediately or be lost for decades.

So I’m thinking of Gil Scott-Heron and his commendable activism against the nuclear industry and apartheid South Africa, and the litmus test of one’s commitment to justice, equality and the rule of law, i.e., supporting the Palestinians against Israel, and how two weeks ago I saw my first keyboard hero, Ray Manzarek (of the Doors), at the Sellersville Theater, pleased with his acid-tested spirituality, telling the crowd that Christians and Muslims and Jews should put away their religious books and just love each other and, by the way, he and Robby Krieger are looking forward to playing as the Doors in Tel Aviv this summer because “the Israelis are so cool.”

(Hey, Ray, how about you and Robby do something that truly breaks on through: be on the next Free Gaza flotilla and play a Gaza concert if and when you “break on through” the illegal Israeli blockade — maybe you can see how “cool” the IDF is. Maybe you can grab Jim Morrison from out of the ether, where you said he resides, and bring your interstellular spirituality down to earth where it might mean something. It says in the Uncool Book that faith without works is dead.) Oh well, as a sometime Zionist, sometime Christian troubadour once admonished us, “Don’t follow leaders and watch the parking meters.” He never explained the parking meter thing though I assumed he was warning us not to take up the drunken dares of friends to vault over the meters after the bars close.

And I give Gil Scott-Heron almost the last word: “It ain’t no new thing — America is always the same old shit.”

Now, are those words from many years ago too negative and cynical, too unhopey and unchangey? Well, decades after Gil Scott-Heron urged people to send their unaffordable, unpaid “doctor bills to whitey on the moon,” he lived to see 45 million Americans without any health insurance and 47 million on food stamps. He railed against ghetto poverty in 1970 and 41 years later lived to see the greatest inequalities in wealth since the Great Depression. And he lived to see the first black POTUS, a Nobel Peace Prize-winner who’s currently slaughtering innocent dark-skinned people in five different countries. America can’t make clothes, shoes, toys, electronics, peace or justice but we make a hell of a lot of irony.

Anyway… Gil Scott-Heron, don’t rest in peace as everyone is advising you to, rage on wherever you are, be witty and scathing, be the fighter you are, be bold when no one else will, whether you’re in heaven or hell, I’m sure that things can be better in both places. Take with you into eternity the fiery ambitious man/child who wrote a well-regarded novel, “The Vulture,” when you were only 19 years old. Fuck crack, fuck Rikers, fuck HIV, fuck capitalism's blunting of your spirit, it happens, from time to time the darkness comes along to terrorize the weak and challenge the strong, because you were a human being, not a god, the storm is coming, it grows on the waves from Johannesburg to Montego Bay, these were tiny blips on the road to making a beautiful soul, none of us are who capitalism says we are, we have no idea who we are or what we could be, but justice is coming on the wings of a storm and we resist in the present for those yet unborn, what’s that music (storm music) playin’ on the radio, what’s that music (storm music) playin’ everywhere I go, I don’t think I’ve ever heard a sweeter feelin’ in the whole wide world than Gil Scott-Heron playing “Storm Music” on the radio.

published 5/31/2011 at counterpunch.org

The Good Don't Triumph And There Is No Justice

2011-07-05T07:56:00.000-07:00

Brian De Palma's "Blow Out" Thirty Years On

This July 21 is the 30th anniversary release date of Brian De Palma’s political/conspiracy thriller “Blow Out,” starring John Travolta, Nancy Allen and John Lithgow. Critics praised De Palma’s artful weaving of references to other directors and movies and real life events into “Blow Out” but audiences were turned off by the film’s ravagingly sad ending. As a movie heathen, I’m not so interested in De Palma’s cinematic virtuosity, and I feel that the critics never got to the heart of why this is such a powerful film — which is the fact that it’s a deep and devastating attack on America. The film’s numerous similarities and small divergences from today’s political landscape are instructive.

SPOILER ALERT! I reveal the ending of “Blow Out,” so if you haven’t seen it and intend to, you might want to stop reading now.

Travolta plays Jack, a sound technician who serendipitously records an auto accident which turns out to be the murder of the governor of Pennsylvania and potential presidential candidate. Jack rescues Sally (Nancy Allen) from the crash scene and the story follows their efforts to interest the authorities in the evidence they have, the conspiracy/cover-up they are met with and their own fated investigation as they battle against the political operative/murderer Burke, played by John Lithgow. The film is set in Philadelphia against the backdrop of a splashy patriotic ain’t-we-great “Liberty Days” celebration.

Jack and Sally represent marginal members of the American working class, motivated chiefly by guilt and trying to redeem themselves. The fact that they feel guilt is in stark contrast to the powers that be in the movie or to America’s real political, financial and military elite who would find it unfathomable to redeem themselves because they would never imagine that they’ve done anything wrong – except, perhaps, not made enough money or not bombed enough countries.

Jack and Sally are pitted against Burke who is no mere private eye gone bad. No, Burke has superior knowledge of surveillance, wiretapping, the staging of “accidents” and various ways to kill people. It’s never made explicit in the movie but I take Burke as some kind of ex (?) government agent, probably a CIA assassin. He is a one man death squad who ties up the “loose ends” and engages in false flag murders of complete strangers to cover up the murder he really wants to commit. The powerful and privileged are protected at all costs.

The greatness of “Blow Out” is due to the contrast between what America thinks itself to be versus what it actually is. In the movie, as in real life, while the people are having an Old Glory-gasmic celebration of the America they think they live in — freedom, democracy, the light unto the world — in reality, in the underbelly of the nation, the real work is being done by people like Burke, who murder innocent people right and left and get away with it, violating every law and premise the nation was supposedly founded on — except murder and theft are exactly what it was founded on. The “Liberty Days” revelers whoop it up in mirage America, the America that never was or is always just out of reach, just one more election away, celebrating fake freedom (the one that doesn’t know it’s chained up because it never moves) and fake democracy (the one where we’re supposed to be eternally grateful to vote for one of the twin heads, Republican or Democrat, of the capitalist freak.)

“Blow Out’s” roof top climax, played out beneath the exploding fireworks of “Liberty Days,” is one of the most memorable scenes in all of film. Travolta’s character Jack does everything in his power to do the right thing but he and Sally are ultimately destroyed, Sally physically and Jack, more pertinent to everyday life in America, mentally, socially, emotionally and spiritually. When Jack tries to be an honest, altruistic full participant in society, when he becomes the most vital and self-actualized, and the least little bit effective (a hero for the working class, as opposed to Navy SEAL death squad heroes for the ruling class), America promptly destroys him. Jack lives in trickle-down America where evil, not wealth, trickles down and ruins many a small life. “Blow Out” is a great and terrible Greek-like tragedy because Jack gets the person killed that he risked his own life to initially save.

It was actually the audiences, not the critics, who best understood “Blow Out.” The critics were too cowardly and unclassconscious to acknowledge the truth of a film that took on the Great Satan, they could only speak of De Palma’s technical brilliance. But the audiences — they understood in a visceral way, the ending smacked them in the mouth, the ending said all is not well here, their hopes and dreams and notions of justice crushed, innocence laid waste (as represented by Sally), the mockery of the “promise” of America and all the lies told to children every day in every school. Audiences recoiled at seeing themselves as the mindless “Liberty Days” revelers instead of the heroic resisters like Jack and Sally — they understood that they betray the founding icons every day — by never taking a risk to overthrow the illegitimate ruling class — even as they celebrate those icons.

On the roof top in “Blow Out,” on a raw revelatory monumentally sad Independence Day night, the flags wave, the fireworks explode and the cheers rise while, out of sight and under the din, another innocent person is anonymously killed for the American ruling class. That’s the American creation story, by God: the good don’t triumph and there is no justice. America wrecks the world, America moves on — and it all so easily escapes the notice of the revelers. America doesn’t pay, America doesn’t make amends, so get used to it, red man, black man, yellow man, sand man. And if every once in a blue moon the serfs get hit and bellyache, “Why do they hate us!” — and the masters go on a ten-year murder tantrum across the earth — well, for Wall Street, the Pentagon and the corrupt politicians who successfully run on racism and warmongering, well, it’s all good. In fact, it’s a bonanza. Let a thousand Blackwaters bloom. That’s your American revolution, that’s your gift to the world.

De Palma took much more heat for his 2007 film “Redacted” than he did from the 30-year-old “Blow Out” even though the latter will probably go down many years from now as the most consummate film critique of America. (“Redacted” was based on the true story of Abeer Hamza, a 14-year-old Iraqi girl who was gang-raped and murdered in her home by American soldiers. The troops also murdered her mother, father and 6-year-old sister. Just a little slice of life in America’s nonstop unconstitutional wars which weak-ass liberals insist that their hero Obama continue. Yes, liberals support the gang-rape of children and mass murder — see how easy it is to be Fox News when your Dumbocratic targets don’t, in fact, have any principles except getting their unprincipled man elected?)

The one faulty thing about “Blow Out” is that John Lithgow’s character is presented as a rogue operative whereas the lawlessness and murderousness that he symbolizes have always been US government policy, though, unlike today’s world, they used to be officially denied and decried. Also of note: Lithgow’s character is cut loose in the end by his superiors as opposed to, say, the way Obama moved heaven and earth to get CIA agent Raymond Davis, accused of murdering two Pakistanis, out of a jail in Pakistan and back to America.

Another divergence between “Blow Out” and the present concerns the idea of conspiracy. In “Blow Out” there is an all-encompassing successful conspiracy. But that was so then (Reagan) and this is now (Obama). And what’s different now is that the constitutional scholar/shredder Obama has normalized his predecessors’ crimes: undeclared wars, torture, indefinite detention and extra-judicial assassination (including of American citizens) are now openly defended and celebrated. When you can openly get away with these crimes and more, when there is no effective opposition to anything you do, what need is there for a conspiracy?

Now that I’ve given you my bleak interpretation of Brian De Palma’s bleak vision of (bleeping) America, let me cheer you up. I’m no comedian but I do know a few jokes.

Did you hear the one about the country that got its pride back after ten years by summarily executing a 54-year-old dialysis patient? Booyah! You don’t think that’s funny? Well there’s lots of college students, who were only ten years old at the time when the pride was lost, who think it’s a riot… Tomorrow belongs to them and they are well prepared — look at all the American flags apparently stashed in their dorms, ready for any Old Glory-gasmic celebration that comes along…

What about the one where a government walks into a bar and says give me billions of dollars each year to fight a terrorist boogeyman and then, when the same government has the opportunity to easily capture the terrorist and question him about his worldwide links to other terrorists, and put him in handcuffs and frog-march him into court for months on end and demystify him — but, instead, chooses to immediately gun him down and silence him, thus insuring his martyrdom…? You heard that one too? You’re so hip, you must watch a lot of TV!

OK, what about the killing of the terrorist in Abbottabad, Pakistan and the 24-hour aftermath where, in Washington (District of Costellobad), the White House took back the tale of the bloodthirsty fiend shot dead in a fire fight while cowardly using one of his wives as a human shield in his luxurious mansion while his impoverished followers freeze their jihadis off in caves? You don’t think that’s funny? You know, you’re a tough crowd, so let’s just call it a night before I start heckling you back.

Just go out and get the Criterion Collection’s recently released “Blow Out” on Blu-ray or a double disc DVD containing lengthy interviews with Brian De Palma and Nancy Allen, De Palma’s 1967 feature “Murder a la Mod,” a booklet and many other extras.

published 5/13/2011 at counterpunch.org

Rutabaga Ridge and Bac-O

2011-02-12T19:07:00.000-08:00

A Joke of a Country

The aftermath of the Arizona shooting reminded me of how much support there is for the Second Amendment compared to other amendments. No one -- left or right -- believes that guns will be restricted in any way.

Not so with the other amendments. The ruling class has figured out how to make the Bill of Rights irrelevant.

The First Amendment now means we have the right to assemble in cages far away and out of sight of our political leaders at their conventions. (If dissent falls over in a cage does it make a sound?) Freedom of speech now only has real meaning and impact if there are millions of dollars of TV and radio advertising behind it.

The Fourth Amendment was KOed in the phony war on drugs but its body is still kicked about the ring in the phony war on terror. Waking up each day in America means learning how many new ways we are spied upon and not free. Now there’s an ever-growing number of places where we are not secure in our persons and effects -- homes, phones, vehicles, cameras, computers, airports and, soon, bus and train stations and malls. (I absolutely draw the line at my favorite station -- the Magnum roller coaster station at Cedar Point.) I fantasize about tens of millions of crazed Fourth Amendment fetishists. You’ll only pull that probable cause from my cold dead hands.

The Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Amendments are a nightmarish parade of absurdities where it’s entirely possible to be an illiterate Afghan goat herder kidnapped by a criminal gang ( “He was Osama bin Laden’s yogurt man!”) and sold to the American military for a lottery-like pay out and then be jailed and tortured (if tortured to death, stop here) without charge or trial and, years later, stood up in a show trial held out of sight on an island nation (which Americans have always been taught hates freedom and democracy) and have the torture-induced false confession used as evidence against you and then, when you are miraculously found not guilty, you can continue to be held and put into however many jeopardies it takes to keep you locked up forever and then thrown into solitary confinement in a Supermax prison, like 25,000 Americans, where your mind will be destroyed in a most definite cruel and unusual punishment, and all of this is just a pit stop to your ultimate destination on a gurney where you can, finally, wrongfully, legally, be tortured to death in a “botched” execution. And your kidnapping, false imprisonment, torture and death will be proudly used by politicians to drum up money and votes. It may not be George Mason and James Madison’s cup of tea but it hits the spot with the Tea Party, most of the United States Congress and President Obummer -- and these highly evolved superior beings are all that matter.

And yet the Second Amendment seems immune from any encroachment. But I put it to you that we don’t know how strong the Second Amendment muscle really is because it never gets a decent workout. And here’s how to exercise it: I urge all animal liberationists, eco- warriors and every Latino and Muslim in America to assemble the vast, but perfectly legal, arsenals that many on the white right have always had. Then we will see how well-tolerated the Second Amendment is, something the Black Panthers learned long ago. I expect that we would see vegan compounds -- bloody Rutabaga Ridges and Bac-Os -- being stormed by the ATF and FBI.

***

My favorite headline about the Arizona shooting came from the January 8 Trentonian which threw in everything but the kitchen sink: “Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords shot in head in terrorist attack: federal judge, 9/11 girl killed; is Sarah Palin responsible?”

Here’s a quote from the article:

“Giffords is known in her southern Arizona district for her numerous public outreach meetings, which she admitted in an October interview with the Associated Press can sometimes be challenging.

‘You know, the crazies on all sides, the people who come out, the planet earth people,’ she said following an appearance with Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in Tucson, where Mullen was questioned by a woman who wanted the military to start ‘building cities instead of destroying them.’ ‘I’m glad this just doesn’t happen to me.’”

Right. The crazies, the planet earth people who would rather see money spent building cities than destroying them. The crazies who don’t like mountaintop removal and fracking and unconstitutional wars and extra-judicial assassinations and indefinite detention and giving away the public treasury to thieving bankers, or the ongoing spectacle of Senate warmongers like John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman pushing for turning Iran into thousands of bloody Safeway parking lots.

McCain was quoted in the same Trentonian article from Colombia, America’s favorite human rights abuser in Latin America, where he was visiting its president. Arizona is a mere anti-union “right to work” state but oh what a free market paradise Colombia is -- there, right wing death squads successfully compete against labor organizers by routinely killing them. I’m sure Sen. McCain was raising (Arizona?) hell about all those murdered union organizers. It’s more likely that the senator was ascertaining how well American tax dollars are being spent to exterminate leftist guerillas under the cover of a bogus “war on drugs” and ginning up trouble against Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela next door.

******

The United States Congress feels no urgency about the following: On January 7 the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced there are 14.5 million unemployed Americans, 8.9 million others who are working part-time but who want full-time work, 1.3 million who looked for work in the preceding 12 months but not in the four weeks leading up to the employment survey and 1.3 million discouraged workers who have given up looking for work altogether -- for an official grand(ly understated) total of 26 million unemployed or under-employed. Contrariwise, the United States Congress moved heaven and earth in one week in 2008 to prop up insolvent zombie financial institutions with a potential $20 trillion, according to SourceWatch, of which the bankers took millions for Christmas bonuses and kicked back a tiny amount as the Congressional bribes known as campaign contributions.

Trillion$ to pay off the gambling debts of zombie banksters, 26 million Americans without jobs. A joke of a country. A lawless country -- with more repressive laws than ever -- socially, morally and financially bankrupt, that rightly commands no loyalty or respect. Fast action and trillion$ for bankers, millions of jobless Americans fighting for every little scrap they can get, whether it’s food stamps or unemployment benefits. That’s the priorities of the sanctimonious corruptatons in the United States Congress who call for civility in public discourse while they spend trillions of more dollars on the slaughter of innocent people in unconstitutional wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Arizona shooter is presented as an aberration while the CIA and young men at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada kill hundreds of times more civilians in Pakistan (over 2,000 murdered since Obama took office) in their computer-guided drone strikes.

The Arizona shooting will evolve from ruling class hand wringing about the rabid right’s rhetoric to concrete actions against Julian Assange, Bradley Manning, eco-activists, Hugo Chavez, the FARC, Iran, Hezbollah and any entity effectively resisting the American empire.

*********

I fluctuate every day, sometimes every hour, between hope and despair. My hope is the destruction of the American empire -- my despair is that it might not happen in time for millions of people. At this moment, I’m unexpectedly bullish on its demise. I’m totally confident, for the next ten seconds, that something this arrogant, bankrupt and nakedly hypocritical is creating the courageous and determined people all over the world -- in the jungles and deserts and even in the belly of the military beast itself -- who will bury it, and have a good laugh doing it. Hallelujah, brother!

Oops -- too late. Back to the shit. This country is in permanent lockdown. We have the right to dream and the right to blow off steam but not the ability to change anything. Every day we slog on, on fire but insensate, through the perfectly calibrated Hell of America where nothing positive can happen for the vast working class majority unless it first, and mostly, benefits a tiny minority of rapacious parasites. The money is for THEM, the mainstream news is for THEM, all the worry and concern and action in government is for THEM, everything is for THEM and we are of no consequence. Dictators of the world, come visit America and see how it’s really done: Here the slaves believe they are free because they can buy iShit in ten different colors. Here it’s a way of life that the majority NEVER gets what it wants whether it’s universal single-payer health insurance, an end to wars or an end to bailing out the rich. Behold the narcissistic obedient subjects, with their phenomenal tolerance for dark-skinned pain and death, who have the exact government they deserve -- watch them work until they drop because Wall Street fleeced them of tens of trillions of dollars in fraud-filled pump and dump asset bubbles. Behold the Marlboro Man dreams floating above the foundational cowardice of the American working class, ignorantly proud that, unlike the French and Greeks and Tunisians, they would never cause any trouble for their capitalist masters. Behold the Extermi-Nation, where the only honorable place to be is six feet under or the penitentiary. Martin Luther King knew it then, Bradley Manning knows it now. Listen up, Obummer: Manning is closer to King than you have ever been and will ever be.

published 1/25/2011 at dissidentvoice.org

Al-Qaeda Wants to Kill You with Rattlesnakes!

2010-12-25T22:22:00.001-08:00

Shake Your Rattlebooty

My hometown paper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, wasn’t much interested earlier this year when WikiLeaks released “Collateral Murder,” the classified American military video which showed an Apache helicopter crew having a jolly time mowing down Iraqi civilians, including children and two Reuters news staffers.

But now that ghost face killa Joe Lieberman has given American business its marching orders to destroy WikiLeaks, the Inquirer has plenty of alarmist anti-WikiLeaks stories.

My favorite recent WikiLeaks scare, entitled “a hit list for al-Qaeda,” told of “infuriated” unnamed government officials who “expressed alarm” that WikiLeaks released a State Department cable of “potential targets” whose disruption by al-Qaeda could “jeopardize our national security.” Among the targets: the Panama Canal, the Strait of Hormuz and the Australian laboratory that produces polyvalent crotalid antivenin — the antidote for rattlesnake venom. Yup, public enemy number one, Julian Assange, went and told Osama bin Laden where the Panama Canal is — and we’d been keeping it from him for all these years!

The concern expressed for the Strait of Hormuz, through which much of the world’s oil is transported, was touching also. Touching, because many United States Congresspersons foam at the mouth for an Israeli attack on Iran which, in turn, would shut down the strait and cause gas prices to soar. But it all makes sense in Capitol Hell: if Israeli aggression causes me to pay $10 a gallon for gas that’s a regrettable but necessary thing, whereas if al-Qaeda causes this same result it’s an economic disaster for the world that can only be properly avenged by murdering a multitude of Muslim civilians.

As for the al-Qaeda/rattlesnake connection, well, this makes sense too. If you’re a person in Iraq or Afghanistan or Pakistan or Yemen, and America is converting your wedding parties into funerals, your rage is likely directed to one thought only: I’m going to get even by making sure that some poor bastard in West Texas, dying of a rattlesnake bite (which he probably deserved), knows in his dying moments, when he can’t get any antivenin, that Sharia law and baba ganoush have triumphed after all.

But what if the shadowy world of the pit viper family began working tail in hand with al-Qaeda? What would an al-Qaeda terrorist rattlesnake be like? If he was like the failed shoe bomber and the failed underwear bomber, and all the other terrorists who can’t find a gun or a knife or a match in America, he’d be a little bit off. To wit:

If a terrorist rattlesnake was coiled up in the seat next to you on an airplane he would probably appear furtive and wouldn’t “look right.” You might be too polite (or afraid) to say something like, “Shouldn’t you be in the cargo area?” Or you might think that this snake has connections, especially if he’s in first class — maybe this is Paris Hilton’s snake, maybe you should ask if he’d pose for a picture together. You should definitely tweet about it immediately. Everything must be okay with the authorities — and that’s all that matters — because the snake made it through the TSA scanner or got felt up just like you did.

Somewhere in your carry on bag you have your good digital camera, the one with the equivalent of a 300 mm zoom lens that pops out about 4 inches — you must have that close up of the snake’s tongue and his rattles. You turn in your seat and zoom in on his face — “Come on, show me your tongue, shake your rattlebooty, attaboy!” and — wham! — out of the blue, the crazy terrorist rattlesnake bites your forearm! But because this is a screw-up terrorist rattlesnake, instead of fangs he has molars and instead of venom he regurgitates a nauseating concoction of chocolate milk and barbecued Fritos all over your arm. You and several other passengers wrestle him to the floor and you end up getting that photo-op after all. You’re famous, baby.

In the weeks following this terrorist plot you and the rest of America learn one of two things:

1) For years the family, friends and neighbors of this particular rattlesnake were victims of a foreign invasion, torture and genocidal killing. It turns out that snake hunters — a tiny subset of America’s treasure trove of psycho killers and sadists — go to the canyons of West Texas and thread long tubing into narrow crevices in canyon walls where rattlesnakes sleep and then pour in gasoline and /or ammonia ( snake hunters care about nature, dontcha know) to drive out the snakes. Then the hunters bravely capture the snakes with long metal tongs and transport them to “festivals” where the animals are shot, burned with cigarettes and sometimes have their mouths sewn shut with wire before they are gutted and skinned. But don’t think this isn’t educational or fun for kids because the adults will let children hold the still beating heart of a decapitated snake and sometimes even the head itself, though it can bite for up to an hour later — see how cruel and vicious rattlesnakes are! So are we creating more terrorist rattlesnakes faster than we are killing them? A known known that only Donald Rumsfeld doesn’t know for sure.

Or, we learn this:

2) The FBI befriended and cultivated this terrorist rattlesnake and bought him the plane ticket. They knocked him out, drained him of all venom, filed down his fangs and promised him a fabulous garbage dump in paradise where, rather than 72 virgins, there will be 72,000 varmints.

After the plot is foiled the FBI offers this terrorist rattlesnake a deal and puts him in the same small cell as Private First Class Bradley Manning, whose 23rd birthday occurred on December 17. The rattlesnake — touted by the FBI as “pet therapy” — is a sop to civil libertarians who had complained about Manning’s mind-destroying solitary confinement, the 23 hours of each day with no contact with any living creature. The government’s impeccable reasoning is this: the snake scares or befriends Manning who turns on WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange who turns on all the people in the world who he doesn’t know who steal and anonymously leak classified information and who hate the American government and then, after a few decades, when everybody who has a contrary view to the US government is behind bars or dead, the war on terror is over and America wins. It all makes perfect sense — if it didn’t the American public wouldn’t believe it. And if it didn’t make sense, newspapers like the Philadelphia Inquirer would alert us immediately.

published 12/24/2010 at dissidentvoice.org

Grand Central Nature

2010-12-05T10:22:00.000-08:00

A Jug of Wine, a Loath of Them, and Thou

I used to be a very active animal activist. One of the things that I and my comrades would contend with was charges by others that we liked non-humans better than humans. “Why aren’t you doing something for people?” went the seemingly pre-recorded announcement from passing strangers at our demonstrations. And whenever you probed the loudest mouth of them all you’d find that he — inevitably a he — wouldn’t be donating his time to anybody, human or non-human. We activists were always calling up a list of things that we either did or were (nurses, therapists, teachers, social workers, etc. ) or feeding vegan meals to the homeless or earnestly enumerating the many personal health and environmental benefits from not exploiting animals. Always trying to justify ourselves -- and compassion and mercy -- to stone cold barbarians.

   *

A couple weeks ago my girlfriend and I spent four days at the White Pig Bed and Breakfast, a 175-acre nature sanctuary in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Charlottesville, Virginia. Soaking in the outdoor hot tub one night, we saw a shooting star and, later, turned off the jets and listened as various creatures walked about unseen in the dark woods. In the daytime we rubbed the snouts and bellies of the sanctuary’s resident pot-bellied pigs, hiked up to the top of the cascading Crabtree Falls (where it seems to rain lady bugs) and enjoyed all manner of trails in the splashy glowing Shenandoah Forest. Walking one day deep in a sunny valley there was nothing but stillness — and a four foot black snake lying zigzag across the trail. We walked right in front of him and he never moved. I turned around and took a few pictures, capturing his angular pose, and then he finally slid on. It made me feel good that this creature was apparently not afraid of us. This was his land, his home he seemed to say. Why should he live in fear here? He and we seemed to be starting at ground zero with each other. And I like that feeling a lot. I like meeting creatures who have neither been terrorized nor tamed by humans.

But what’s nature without a little “red in tooth and claw,” courtesy of human shock and awe? Many of us hiking in the Blue Ridge, or standing on the magnificent overlooks, would occasionally hear gunshots ringing out, reminding us that hunters were playing army against the animals we marvel at or gearing up to do so in the weeks ahead. It was the reminder that some people enjoy watching the light and life go out of an innocent creature’s eyes. No empathy or appreciation of what it’s like to be unarmed, defenseless and shot, to be raising your family or searching for food or simply having a pleasant glorious day and then have someone come into your home (when their home of superior comfort and ease is far away) and perform the profoundly cowardly act of shooting you. Practicing cowardice over and over again is utterly emasculating.

   * *

Sometimes you explore to get lost and surprised and other times to find a setting for a jug of wine, a loaf of bread and thou. And sometimes all you get is a hearty satisfying loathe of THEM. Climbing the Humpback Mountain trail we found that the summit was grand central nature chock-a-block with “humanity” jostling for the highest bestest view near the edge of the giant Humpback Rock outcropping, complete with children falling on the slippery slanted rocks and their parents screaming after-the-fact warnings, all the while bumping others with well-provisioned voluminous backpacks and ski poles (used as walking sticks) as they pin-balled yupward to the absolute top (civilization, i.e., the parking lot, was all of 20 minutes — downhill — away.)

A great place to contemplate nature as you can see — human nature. It didn’t matter that the entire view was spectacular wherever you stood, the humans already at the top wouldn’t budge so the new climbers could take their place and that didn’t stop the newcomers from pushing their way through the madding crowd. Peaceable me preferred a compromise where they embraced and then took a lovers’ leap. Remember, this is all on the edge of a 3,000 foot mountain. There didn’t seem to be any appreciation by the conquerors that nature can be hazardous as well as beautiful. It was a jumbled pointless “rock” concert minus the music and dope. I fantasized that we might go one purple-assed baboon (thank you, William Burroughs) over the line sweet Jesus and the whole overhang would give way and we’d tumble into the valley below. That would teach us.

Well, no, it wouldn’t. Disaster doesn’t teach humans anything. If it did, we wouldn’t be starting a new war in the Middle East every little whipstitch or give money to too big to fail banks so they can scarf up their competitors and become even too bigger to fail in the future. I’ll stick with the quiet sunlight on the dignified blacksnake. I could watch him for hours, but I couldn’t stand the humans on the peak of Humpback Mountain for 30 seconds. Sayonara. “What’s it like up there?” asked one ascending hiker on our way down. “It’s like Market Street in Philly — except there’s ski poles.”

   * * *

After my first night back at work — I work in the automotive industry — I was driving home through Valley Forge National Historical Park at 11:30 at night and the car in front of me swung into the oncoming lane to avoid something. And that something was a young deer sitting in the road, looking back and forth with her legs tucked under her. I stopped, put my flashers on and got out.

She was very afraid and tried rising on her front legs and dragged herself near some grass at the side of the road. Both of her back legs were badly injured. She looked around for help and I could hear her mother or another of her tribe snorting nearby in the darkness. I didn’t know what I could do for her so I walked over to her, knelt down, started petting her and talked to her. She eased up and didn’t try to get away. After a few moments, I got up.

Cars and cars and cars are going by. I’m offered all kinds of advice: “Don’t go near it, they’ll kick ya!” Others asked if I needed some automotive help. Yeah, I need for you and me to get the fuck off this planet, I thought. I need for cars, these slaughterhouses on wheels, to die. I wave the cars around. Why aren’t you people home in bed? Why are you and I on the roads at midnight on a Tuesday? Why do country roads have interstate-sized traffic on them? Why are there two busy roads right in the middle of what should be a 3,600-acre nature sanctuary?

I called my girlfriend and she gave me a couple numbers of wildlife rehabbers, one of whose recorded announcement said that they weren’t taking any calls that week and another whose recording advised calling the game commission. I left messages anyway and then decided there was no good answer for this deer so I called 911. After about 15 minutes a couple park rangers pulled up behind me and I asked if anything non-lethal could be done for this creature. One said they would take care of it and that I should go. The ranger acted like I was a crazy person and this was a big joke. I was finding it hard to leave. I got in my car, started to drive then rolled down the window and, not knowing exactly what I wanted to say, uttered, “This is all very sad.” “Will you go now,” he said. And after about five seconds of driving I heard a gunshot as they killed her.

   * * * *

There’s a good chance, even without getting hit by a car and then shot, that this deer might have only lived two more weeks. That’s because Valley Forge National Historical Park is now in the first week of its first-ever deer kill, a $3 million four-year plan to kill 1,100 of the park’s estimated 1,277 deer. After the formality of “democracy,” a bogus public comment period which had all the effect of an antiwar sign on Dick Cheney, the park did what it was always going to do from the beginning.

In every park deer kill the cover story is always the “understory,” the saplings, seedlings and shrubs that deer have the audacity to eat. These plants, plus ground-nesting birds and tulips (deer Tofutti), don’t compete very successfully with deer and that is something the Dr. Frankenstein park managers aim to change. The managers “manage” and disdain mere wilderness and wildlife sanctuaries where animals work out their own destinies. The hell with evolution or survival of the fittest. And all of this nature vivisection is done at the expense of the deer and must never inconvenience the humans, their tourism, their cars, their parking lots, their roads, the chemical run-off from their nearby farms or their high-speed commerce.

Even compared to other parks, which have far fewer resources, Valley Forge park officials acted in very bad faith. Park officials admit that the deer population peaked in 2005 and has declined and stabilized, proving that the deer can be controlled without shooting. How many deer are in the park is also an open question because the park extrapolated its count from several “eyeball” surveys done by volunteers instead of conducting more accurate infrared aerial surveys before and after last year’s hard winter. Even working within their own murderous logic, park officials could choose not to shoot bucks so that the natural one to one ratio between bucks and does can be re-established faster and result in less deer being killed overall. Instead, the park’s plan is to kill bucks, does, young, old, healthy, unhealthy, whatever it takes to kill 500 deer this winter.

Beyond the understory cover story, the real story is this: it’s many people’s perception that there’s too many large disobedient rebel animals who will not be contained by the average fence and who do not recognize capitalist property rights or the rules of the road which state: get the hell out of the human way. Valley Forge Park has been under pressure for years from wealthy land owners adjacent to the park, a noisy kind of Hostas Rights Movement, who lose thousands of dollars each year (they say) to deer eating their ornamental plants and shrubs. These money patriots love living near the park — they just don’t like the wildlife that comes with it. Do I relate to people who have thousands of dollars to spend each year on ornamental plants? Do I give a damn about their money or their mistaken view that they own the outdoors? I don’t recognize their “property rights” over nature or the illegitimate laws used to enforce them. I’m not “civilized,” thank God. Bambi and Proudhon believed the same righteous thing: all property is theft — and I’m with them.

The deer are also unpopular with many motorists who are far too busy and important to slow down in the park. Presented with no stop signs, traffic lights or speed bumps, their perception is that “nothing’s here.” So, if they can, they blow through the park, often at 50 mph, because they know the frustration that awaits them on Routes 202 and 422 and the mordantly named Schuykill “Expressway,” one of the best monuments to civilization anywhere in the world. No, nothing’s here, nothing except all these deer, foxes, raccoons, chipmunks, skunks, opossums, squirrels, turtles, snakes, frogs, birds and, yes, a bona fide predator of deer, a few coyotes.

Lowering the speed limit in the park from 35 to 25, and enforcing it, would probably eliminate nearly every deer/vehicle collision. For a brief time every day I bring the revolution to the park by going 25 mph. Since it’s clear that you, O working class, aren’t going to perform your historic mission, your real work of overthrowing capitalism (you're about 162 years late for work, according to Marx and Engels), I don’t give one little damn about you being on time to your bogus work, your make-believe work, your slave work, your artificial world work, your obedient ass-kissing keep your head down work, your life-wasting soul-draining work, your manufacturing of death work, your unquestioning anti-Earth work. I don’t care about interrupting your lifelong inertia dream. As you can imagine, I'm sometimes late for work. So don’t get behind me because I will lead you nowhere, slowly. I’ll make you watch the black snake indefinitely or stand in a lady bug blizzard and I’ll comfort your enemies, like the deer.

published 11/15/2010 at dissidentvoice.org

Caucasian Porn: the White Imagi-Nation

2010-12-05T10:05:00.000-08:00

Hang in There, Magenta People, We're on Our Way!

Hey Raheim,

Thanks for letting me borrow Avatar, The Hurt Locker, and Blind Side. You really hooked me up this time. How did you know that Caucasian porn is one of my guilty little pleasures? Having merciful, just, compassionate and brave white people always available and their goodness spurting off like Old Faithful, OMG, is so hot. Here’s my review:

I have to hand it to us: we whites are the most selfless, courageous, beneficent people who ever walked the face of … the silver screen. From pistol-packing white mama Sandra Bullock sashaying into the hood to tell off the home boys in Blind Side (how come those black savages aren’t doing honest work for six bucks an hour in one of Bullock’s millionaire husband’s fast food chain restaurants/plantations?) to the white gimp hero being made whole in his blue heaven of Avatar (white men can jump on Pandora!) and leading the blue savages to victory (after he and his kind brought them carnage and mayhem) to The Hurt Locker soldiers de-mining bombs unfairly planted by the sand savages (after the soldiers and their kind brought them carnage and mayhem.) The problem is always savages — savages, savages everywhere. Savages of every color and stripe (the Na’vi!) and not enough white people to save them. Whites! Carnage! Action! Salvation! Hang in there, magenta people, wherever you are, we’re on our way to save you (from us, after the introductory offer of carnage and mayhem.)

(Memo to white Christians: time to get couples counseling because, while you’re keeping the home fires and hell fires burning, the God you worship apparently hates you: He keeps carousing out there in the Third World and even other galaxies, giving away all the cosmic bling — the buffalo, the oil, the “unobtainium” — to the savages.)

I know you liked Blind Side, Raheim, but if you want a classic football movie check out North Dallas Forty with its humor, injuries, legal and illegal drugs, racism, sadistic coaches, greedy owners, groupies, the stamping out of individuality, and the camaraderie and love of competition that keeps players hanging in there to the bitter end. Should Blind Side get points because it’s based on a true story, this tale of a white southern Republican family that adopts a young black male who goes on to college and pro-football? Nah. It left me cold. I’m not interested in the America that accidentally coughs up a diamond every once in a while for our pleasure and pacification — I’m interested in seeing movies about everything that capitalism deliberately devours and shits out to produce that diamond or, more accurately, fool’s gold. Probably in the last 300 years in America there were a couple dozen instances of white people helping out black people — and Hollywood made blockbusters out of all of them.

In Avatar, put aside the white male hero character going off the rez — that’s too easy to slam — I didn’t buy Sigourney Weaver’s character trying to schmooze the tall athletic Na’vi. Wouldn’t the American empire have sent somebody like NBA Commissioner David Stern to see if the blue freaks could hit the turnaround jumper? The empire needs to be entertained too, you know. Isn’t an NBA commish born to negotiate with chief mercenary Stephen Lang, concerning the merits of a possible new expansion franchise, the Pandora Tail-Shtuppers? Even if Pandora was destroyed, a few Na’vi could have been brought back as “hardship” cases and been mentored and tutored about the discovery of their country by “explorers” Lang and Weaver and then suited up.

I’ll say one thing for Avatar, though: this film is a crack across the mouth of America, America’s military, and everything the American empire is doing in the world. Director James Cameron turned up the squirm knob on American filmgoers cuz by all rights they should have been cheering and whooping that the underdog Na’vi heroically defeated a fiendish aggressor. But there wasn’t that kind of cheering in American theaters (unlike foreign ones) because — oops, cognitive damn dissonance, these villains are the sacred and sainted troops whom it’s so important to glorify at all times. Avatar does not support the troops — and if it cost $300 million to put that statement on screen it was worth it. You can’t get that statement out of the mealy-mouthed “leaders” and supposed radicals in the antiwar movement. Maybe in America you can only tell the truth if you have $300 mil in your pocket. Or are completely broke — anything in between and you’re just a corrupt little weasel in waiting. Apologies to real weasels — we humans just labeled you really funny and it’s a great oversight that our names aren’t reversed and we aren’t all singing I-I-I-I-I-I am everyday weasels… Weasels… need weasels…

That said, Avatar’s not that threatening on a more basic level. A movie of noble savages saying a little prayer for each innocent creature they needlessly slaughter (there seems to be a lot of juicy fruits on Pandora) puts humans back in their cribby comfort zone. Humans are always open to the Good News of the possible necessity of killing something. Americans, in particular, can deal easier with their skyscrapers being knocked down than the true nightmare, the end times scenario: the cheeseless world of the scary vegans. To show you what America really fears, I offer you all the many anti-terror laws used against eco and animal activists during the Bush years (not so much a time of the Great Fear as the time of the Great Big I-Don’t-Give-A-Damn.) The words “soy cheese” and “tofu” elicit more instant hatred and alarm than “fuel oil” and “fertilizer.” (The best sequel to Avatar: an invasion by a thousand vegan missionaries brandishing Cornell University’s “The China Health Project” and Tom Regan’s "The Case for Animal Rights" while simultaneously hunt-sabbing the Na’vi and dodging all of Pandora’s carnivorous creatures. Na’vi eyes would glaze over, preceding their surrender, as we vegans carpet-bombed them with sermons on non-animal sources of B-12 and the hoax of protein complementarity.)

Now the Hurt Locker does support the troops which is why big bad liberal Hollywood gave it the best picture Academy Award over Avatar. This tedious sand fly soap opera is nothing but war propaganda. Scene after scene about the terrible difficulties that invaders, occupiers, and war criminals face. After 90 minutes of murderous foreplay, America finally gets off: a dead young Iraqi boy has a “body bomb” implanted in his torso by the diabolical insurgents and our white hero can’t bear to blow up the dead kid so he basically does open heart surgery to remove the bomb at great risk to his own noble self and carries the dead kid to the safety of the American conscience. It’s so good living here in the White Imagi-Nation. Jesus Christ, we’re good people. We would never stand by and let our government kill one million Iraqis or turn another four million into refugees or destroy their country in a simple tax/wealth transfer from our children’s future to Lockheed and Halliburton’s present. No, we sacrifice our own lives, the most valuable and meaningful lives on this whole damned planet, to make sure that even dead ragheads get a proper burial!

O courageous Hollywood directors, there is a heroic story to be told about Iraq — it’s the Iraqi resistance, particularly the Sunni resistance. At one point the Sunni were fighting the great American murder machine, the fanatical al-Qaeda interlopers and the numerically superior Shia. And in the winter of 2007 with the chaos boiling over it looked like the Sunni just might pull it off and make Uncle Sam cry uncle. But American generals screwed their courage to the sticking place — and put the Sunni on the payroll. I often wonder at the mental gymnastics that friends and loved ones of US soldiers go through. One night we went to bed knowing the Sunni are depraved terrorists who plant IEDs and the next morning the newspapers said these irredeemable murderers are now getting our tax dollars (the “Sunni Awakening” was really the Pentagon Awakening to the fact that it was about to get its five-sided ass kicked out of Iraq.) But where oh where on earth is our revenge supposed to go? And who knew that there’s so much Christian forgiveness at the Pentagon! And no congressperson or prominent media person says a word — just get used to it you idiots, we’ll tell you day is night and shit is sugar and you’ll buy it every time. We’ll tell you who to hate and when to hate and how hard to hate and then tell you to stop on a dime and you losers will do it every time, even if the blood and limbs of your sons and daughters are fertilizing Fallujah. This government is bankrupt because you’re bankrupt.

The Hurt Locker and Blind Side are two “true” stories that paint a more deceptive picture of what life is like in 2010 than does Avatar’s 22nd century Pandora.

Anyway, Raheim, keep the flicks comin’. And don’t forget to shower the weasels you love with love.

published 5/19/2010 at dissidentvoice.org

Kitten Stompers at the Supreme Court

2010-12-05T09:53:00.000-08:00

Alito Dissents as Other Justices Kick Up Their Heels!

Last Tuesday the Supreme Court patted America on the back about its specialness, its sacred right of free speech, by striking down a law which prohibited the selling of “crush” videos where kittens and other small animals are stomped to death for the sadistic sexual satisfaction of, well, people who have a God-given right to sadistic sexual satisfaction and that most defended corollary American right -- the right to make money off of it. The 8 to 1 majority decision (http://is.gd/bAK7p) is a straight up over broad interpretation of a very targeted law which let off the hook nearly every other kind of depiction of animal cruelty -- hunting, slaughterhouses, bullfighting, etc. -- as Justice Samuel Alito’s WTF! dissent makes obvious.

The case in question involved a man selling videos of dogfighting which, like the brutality in “crush” videos, is illegal in every state. However, the eight injustices weren’t interested enough to look at dogfighting on its own brutal “merits” and, instead, twisted themselves into knots trying to find a scenario where the law could be found “over broad.” They came up with a hypothetical someone in non-hunting Washington, DC (huh? -- isn’t it always open season on Muslims there?) possessing a hunting video made in another state. However, even Congressional opponents of the 1999 bill (like Ron Paul) acknowledged that it didn’t apply to depictions of hunting. As Rep. McCollum said, “ The sale of depictions of legal activities, such as hunting and fishing, would not be illegal under this bill.” No matter, the human supremacist court majority wasn’t taking any chances.

Alito’s dissent made the point that “crush” videos are analogous to child pornography: the conduct that they depict has no redeeming social value, free speech does not protect violent criminal conduct and, without prohibiting the trade in these videos, the crimes depicted are almost impossible to investigate and prosecute. Here’s Alito citing the Humane Society of the United States brief:

But before the enactment of §48, the underlying conduct depicted in crush videos was nearly impossible to prosecute. These videos, which “often appeal to persons with a very specific sexual fetish,” were made in secret, generally without a live audience, and “the faces of the women inflicting the torture in the material often were not shown, nor could the location of the place where the cruelty was being inflicted or the date of the activity be ascertained from the depiction.” Thus, law enforcement authorities often were not able to identify the parties responsible for the torture. In the rare instances in which it was possible to identify and find the perpetrators, they “often were able to successfully assert as a defense that the State could not prove its jurisdiction over the place where the act occurred or that the actions depicted took place within the time specified in the State statute of limitations.”(“[I]t is the prosecutors from around this country, Federal prosecutors as well as State prosecutors, that have made an appeal to us for this”); (“If the production of the video is not discovered during the actual filming, then prosecution for the offense is virtually impossible without a cooperative eyewitness to the filming or an undercover police operation.”) In light of the practical problems thwarting the prosecution of the creators of crush videos under state animal cruelty laws, Congress concluded that the only effective way of stopping the underlying criminal conduct was to prohibit the commercial exploitation of the videos of that conduct. And Congress’ strategy appears to have been vindicated. We are told that “[b]y 2007, sponsors of §48 declared the crush video industry dead. Even overseas Websites shut down in the wake of §48.

Wow, a law that worked. A law that prevented hideous torture and brutal killing. Well, we can’t have that.

And there’s a very good reason we can’t have that: it’s very important for the ruling class that the working class accept brutality, both of itself and other “lesser” beings. It’s also important for anyone climbing the greasy pole of American politics to prove their mettle by supporting the slaughter of innocents. It’s all the better if, like hunters Bush and Cheney, they actually get their hands bloody themselves. Before he was elected, all we had from His Barackness was the promise of killing people in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Now he’s made good on that, now he’s a “made” man. He can be trusted to make future “hard decisions” all across the globe.

So Alito did something highly suspicious for a Supreme Court Justice: he showed mercy to creatures who weren’t polluters, war criminals or bankers -- and he did it in a way that linked protecting these creatures to protecting human children. This lapse clearly alarmed his fellow speciesist bigots on the court, especially Stompin’ John Roberts who wrote the majority opinion. And it contrasts with duck-hunting Justice Antonin Scalia who once again did not recuse himself because of his long-standing conflict of interest -- that he’s a vicious bastard.

Now I’m not a lawyer so I can’t speak to all the issues in this case. But I am a revolutionary (i.e., I’m broke and I’m pissed off), so I’m able to say that the government always stands up for the nation’s sacred texts and founding myths as long as they don’t bother anyone in power. “Free speech” is trumpeted when it’s used to stomp on disenfranchised groups like kittens and hamsters or when it’s used to justify bankers buying more congress critters than they already own -- see the recent SCOTUS decision on campaign financing. Capitalist law protects the ruling class, adjudicates disputes between ruling class thieves and sends the working class down long expensive dispiriting dead ends (think Exxon Valdez) when the only true “redress” is revolution. And the Supreme Court is the oil that keeps the American capitalist juggernaut stable and running reliably.

The animal rights movement is no practical threat to the capitalist class, but it is a theoretical threat because it attempts to put a class of beings outside the bounds of who can be exploited -- and that is dangerous and unacceptable. To paraphrase Animal Liberation Front founder Ronnie Lee, speaking at the end of Victor Schonfeld’s great documentary, “The Animals Film,” “The danger of animal liberation is that the working class might look around and say, ‘Maybe we should liberate ourselves from capitalism too.’ ”

And now it’s time for sensitive souls to look away, because I’d like to conclude with the written description of a “crush” video submitted by HSUS to the court so you can see the sadism and brutality that Stompin’ John and his smug cohorts have sentenced thousands of animals to in the days ahead, the horror that’s going on right now behind the walls of some anonymous house in an anonymous world of evil, where, when they hear you scream in agony, it turns them on:

“[A] kitten, secured to the ground, watches and shrieks in pain as a woman thrusts her high-heeled shoe into its body, slams her heel into the kitten’s eye socket and mouth loudly fracturing its skull, and stomps repeatedly on the animal’s head. The kitten hemorrhages blood, screams blindly in pain, and is ul- timately left dead in a moist pile of blood-soaked hair and bone.” Brief for Humane Society of United States as Amicus Curiae 2 (hereinafter Humane Society Brief).

The inspiration for this piece was a tweet of Salon’s Glenn Greenwald where he defended the court’s decision. Screw you, Glenn Greenwald, and your lofty liberal white bread apologetics, which don’t mean shit in the real world of “crush” videos and capitalism.

published 4/23/2010 at counterpunch.org

America on Vacation

2010-12-05T09:13:00.000-08:00

Break Out the Champagne!

I took a vacation in March, fleeing Philadelphia’s worst winter for two weeks in California, sans TV, newspapers and internet. Boy, am I born to vacate and recreate. California’s serf’s were up, all tan and happy and wind-blown, swimming and sunning and surfing and hiking and blading and biking.

And I’m right there with them. I’m all about the coastal mountains now. Here’s my California kaleidoscope: the wind-whipped peak of Ryan Mountain in Joshua Tree National Park, the seals and sea lions at La Jolla Children’s Pool Beach, where much of my favorite movie, The Stunt Man, was filmed ( “Hey, there’s where Steve Railsback saved Barbara Hershey from drowning!”), the narrow trails and exquisite smells of Topagna Canyon, the modest, quirky, creative San Diego houses with backyards sporting orange and lemon and tangerine and banana trees, the nightly exodus to every beach to see the sunset, the tide pools and sea anemones and surfing dolphins at Torrey Pines Beach, the sea otters resting on kelp beds at Point Lobos, the macabre canopy of gnarly leafless oaks lining the country roads in Napa’s wine country, the tears streaming down my face as I stood on one of Big Sur’s cliffs, finally seeing it for the first time after having my imagination fired in my twenties by Henry Miller’s writings -- the fog, the green, the blue, the white bubbly Pacific champagne, thunderous hundred foot waves rearing up and collapsing on the rocks, all along that world-wonder coast and -- turn around -- dense towering redwood forests on more spectacular mountains, and the Henry Miller Library in the middle of it all with editions of his “books of wisdom” tied up with string and hanging from the ceiling like a funky mobile galaxy. Then there was the Doors’ “Tell All The People” blasting out from an open window on a house on the Santa Monica Beach -- the Kush Doctor, the medical marijuana clinic, by God California’s got it going on!

You can be homeless and jobless but still have all the good shit of the Santa Monica Beach available to you. Now I see the merits of the human turtle. I’m willing to embrace my own inner permanent camper. Work? Well, c’mon -- work gives you cancer and kills you. If you think I don’t have the science to back that up I say: probably most everybody who ever died worked at some point in their lives, whether smokers or nonsmokers, vegans or carcass-eaters -- so work’s the single biggest risk factor for dying. Real tortoises can live 150 years and if we give up the hare of the dog’s life that bites us, I bet we can get back to those Biblical life spans. If we give up looking for work that isn’t there, if we give up working jobs that don’t really support us but only keep us in lifelong debt, if we give up work that we have no interest in, if we give up work that’s theoretically useful or helpful but, in practice, isn’t really useful or helpful because the profit motive gets in the way, if we give up work that’s so destructive that it shouldn’t be done at all -- well, there really isn’t any work left to do. Time to hit the beach.

The Old American had a house, a car and a garage. The New American, still finding it hard to give up the old opulence, has a 10-speed, a great sleeping bag and some really big saddle bags. Oh sure, there will be extended families flaunting their wealth by riding custom-made “homes” with 5 and 10 seats but they will be a tolerable minority. The new sportin’ Spartan American will be much more fit and healthy. Ideas of housing, security, stuff and roots are all incompatible with reality. Home schooling? How about classes on the beach everyday? How about classes in redwood forests? Kids, there will be surfing recesses and then it’s back to the sea salt mines to learn how America is a shining city on a hill, best viewed from a really fluffy sleeping bag in a park.

California is too beautiful to waste on civilization. Florida, by comparison, is ugly, ruined, overdeveloped, gone. Florida is Pigeon Forge with manatees. I say we move everybody out of California who has any money or a motor vehicle and turn it over to the homeless and carless. It would be the Trail of Tears (of joy) as the homeless watched celebrities and car dealers and the military move their asses, tanks and Hummers out of the state. I want to see Philly’s homeless squatting in those homes on Malibu Beach. ( I was oddly reassured, about what I’m not sure, by those celebrities having crappy-looking pickup trucks and white cargo vans in their driveways. They’re ready to pack their shit and git!) It’s past time. Where is it written, except at the Supreme Court, that only rich people should see glorious ocean sunsets.

The only disturbing thing that I saw in California was a handful of antiwar protesters in Napa. “War Is Not The Answer” said one of their profound signs. Huh? That doesn’t square with all this murder I feel in my heart. You see, for me personally, and the entire world’s working class, war and fighting back, is the only answer. War is working just fine for the people who it’s being waged for. Dubya’s wars destroyed one of Israel’s enemies, sent Lockheed stock soaring, planted American military bases in Mesopotamia and got the price of gas for Exxon up from a buck-twenty-five a gallon to over $4.00 a gallon. Not to mention all the security and surveillance industries serving America’s totalitarian needs. Seems like some clear-cut victories to me. War works -- if you win it. But you don’t have a shot at winning it unless you actually fight it.

So I’m not coming to any protests by party-pooper progressives for anything less than signs like these:

“You Capitalist Bastards, Wait Till We Get Our Chance.”

“Obama And Congress, My Life Means Nothing To You and Yours Means Nothing to Me -- I Live To See You Get Fucked.”

“Joe Lieberman And John McCain And Lindsey Graham Are Traitors To The Constitution And Hideous Warmongering Motherfuckers Who Don’t Believe In Due Process, Habeus Corpus And The Rule Of Law.”

“The US Government Is An Illegitimate, Exterminationist Bankrupt Criminal Syndicate: One Nation Under a (Fiat) Dollar, Of Wall Street, By War Street, For Israel”

“Wall Street Owns The Congress -- Hey, Senator Dick Durbin Said It!”

“US Government, I Root For Every Poor Person In The World Who’s Fighting Back Against You, Whether Leftist Rebels In The Jungles Or Islamic Fundamentalists In The Deserts.”

“President Smiley Face Is A Blood-Soaked Barbarian Who Murders Innocent People Around the World With Death Squads And Drones.”

Napa protesters, that’s what it’s going to take to get me to join you. (The problem with progressives is that no one can tell the difference between when they’re fighting back and when they’re surrendering because the action is the same: vote Dumbocratic.)

So, until then, I’m partyin’. And, undoubtedly, here’s something else progressive drudges will protest, when the shit finally hits: One day Americans are going to go all the way in a joyous righteous rebellious bloodbath -- it’s not gonna be some Hollywoodically correct magnanimous Avatar shit where the defeated American mercenaries get to slink back to their spaceships to no doubt plan their evil counterattack. No, on the day of judgment in America, there will be dozens of gallows erected on the national mall and millions of Americans will put their names in the hopper, the greatest lottery in history, the Empowerball Jackpot, to see who gets to be the honorable hangmen to put the nooses around the necks of politicians, bankers, polluters, war criminals, war profiteers, Nazi-like media propagandists for war, and all the miscellaneous murderers and rapists and plunderers of the people of Iraq and Afghanistan and Colombia and Iran and Pakistan and Somalia and Gaza and the West Bank and Lebanon and everywhere the boot of capitalist America stomps directly or covertly on the world’s poor and disenfranchised. There will be giant vats of champagne, and music and a great celebration, a proud celebration that JUSTICE HAS FINALLY COME TO AMERICA. The whole world will leap to its feet in ovation! And these bodies will swing until they rot and stink as a reminder to every would-be capitalist tapeworm that the only legitimate power, authority and concern is the working class. “Break out the champagne!” will be the battle cry. That’s how you capitalist bastards and bankers and war criminals will know to run for your lives. “Break out the champagne!”

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh, that feels better. Now that that’s out of my system, for a little while, I can ask: Was any awakening ever anything but rude? As soon as we got back to Philly, we became aware that all manner of evil/commonplace things had happened in Washington politics: The HMOs and drug companies delivered their coup de grace with passage of “health care reform,” an ingenious phrase because it tells three separate lies in only three words. These guys are poets! It’s such a waste to have them in Congress!

And in Israel, Vice President Joe Biden was “humiliated” by another of Netanyahoo’s open proclamations of genocide of the Palestinian people, sugarcoated by the American media as “settlement-building.” I said, “That can’t be. It’s impossible to humiliate a pompous cheerleader for war and a bagman for the credit card mobsters.” And I was right. Biden was not humiliated in the least, because shortly thereafter he gave a speech at Tel Aviv University where he said, “Throughout my career, Israel has not only remained close to my heart but it has been the center of my work as a United States Senator and now as Vice President of the United States.” Now. Still. Wow. And no editor or columnist from the Philadelphia Inquirer would call attention to this bizarre statement that a foreign country’s interests is the center of an American vice president’s political life. Probably because hiding, minimizing and making excuses for Israel’s apartheid, violations of the Geneva Conventions and routine atrocities are some of the pillars of the Inquirer’s work.

Also, while we cats were away: Senators Joe Lieberman and John McCain introduced “The Enemy Belligerent Interrogation, Detention and Prosecution Act” which would let His Highness Obama put into military custody anyone he says is a terrorist “suspect,” without charge and without trial for however long the “war on terror” lasts -- meaning however long capitalist stooges such as himself decide to keep it going by wrecking nation after nation all over the world. This spit in the faces of Jefferson, Franklin, Paine and all the rest applies to American citizens arrested on American soil. I love how the bar gets lowered from “terrorist” to “belligerent” -- maybe next year Lieberman and McCain will sponsor “The Smartypants Act.” “Belligerent” actually gets closer to the truth of what exterminators like Lieberman and McCain are all about -- belligerence isn’t all that far away from resistance and stubbornness and noncompliance and free thought and expression.

As most of my writing here is quite “belligerent” I can only say, See ya in Guantanamo, my fellow proletarians. I do love warm weather. Still...

Hey, you! Obomba! Obummer! Mr. Bad Trip! Would it be asking too much of you to move the new improved Gitmo to Big Sur -- could you do one little fucking positive thing for a member of the American working class?

published 4/7/2010 at counterpunch.org

Madison April 24, 1983

2010-12-05T08:49:00.000-08:00

In the beginning, there were strangers.
One by one we picked them up in Columbus,
Springfield, Dayton, Indianapolis... going to
Madison, Wisconsin to protest the “infliction
of pain to elicit information” -- the torture and
superstitious non-science of animal experiments.

Driving and driving past the gray of Gary
and Chicago, the world in delicious color again
in Wisconsin. Driving and driving past over
around through inconjunct perpendicular
parallel to roadkills slaughterhouses farms
labs shelters pounds puppy mills -- I never knew
how much killing this country can comfortably contain.

The next day the assembly site is incredibly bright,
four thousand hearts heat up and beat as one,
thumbs up from people sitting in windowsills
where archangel Gabriel blows out “Shock the
monkey tonight!” Organizers pass out strips
of black cloth, armbands to symbolize the killings
in the lab, cops everywhere, supposed bomb threats,
someone corporeally in charge says via bullhorn
to form four lines to march down the street,
everybody up front dressed in black.

Empowerment is not knowing anybody,
not being anybody, but knowing instantly that this
is what you were made for and going to the front.
Screams from the back relay up to us: “We’re five
blocks long -- pass it on!... We’re ten blocks long!...”
Now the lines are fourteen blocks long, four thousand
strong chanting shouting marching clapping drumming.
CBS NBC ABC churn away... yes, we’re coming out.

We stop for a moment before turning the final corner
to the lab. Several of us volunteer to be coffin carriers,
not realizing that we’ll get to see everything:
that today is the birth of the animal rights movement
and the thousands of faces who pass will go back
to the hinterlands and build it fast, up from nothing.
We turn the corner. More cops cameras security guards.
And two wooden coffins in the street near the primate lab door.

The isolated pasts of thousands light up the day.
I see my own little wildfire: the kinder-veterinarian
bringing home stray cats and injured birds, the
flaming arguments with adult hunters, then one day
while our cat was dying we heard the receptionist say
the reason our vets were away -- a hunting trip to Montana.

Two lines now, two by two they go by,
silent but for crying, and drop the armbands
in the coffins. On and on they come, it seems
like everyone in the whole world is turning
that corner -- young old radical conservative,
some walking dogs (with black armbands on their paws),
people on crutches and in wheelchairs (sign: Mankind?),
the deaf, the disabled, people sobbing. America,
we’re showing you something you rarely see --
what’s good in you; justice here, mercy there,
all the daring revolutionary pushes and pulls
into a better world. On and on the armbands float down.
People with cancer (sign: Don’t Do It In My Name),
signs speaking for animals around around the globe,
this is the Mobe, the Mobilization for Animals --
today protests in Melbourne Wellington Brussels
Oslo Paris Manchester London Geneva Munich
Boston Cape Town Atlanta Barcelona Heidelberg
Stockholm Davis Marseilles The Hague Edinburgh
and others, on and on like they’ll never stop.
Now I realize what I want out of life: this passion,
this rightness, this thing I can live or die with
and get behind 100%; give it to me,
pour it in me because I am opening up.

Everyone passes. We pick up the coffin: unbelievably,
profoundly heavy these little black armbands,
this weight of death -- no one calculated the heaviness
or considered that we might not be able to lift it.

Far behind, out of sight from the last
of the straggling marchers, we carry the coffins
through almost deserted streets. Feeling lighter,
I could keep walking and walking right out of this world.
I imagine we’ve entered a new land of vegetarianism
and no hunting, trapping or vivisection,
as if all our animal-saving and animal-dying lives
were a dream and this was the real world, the good world...

Walking and walking on a sunny Sunday
in Madison, Wisconsin... What’s that music?
Drums-- you always hear the drums first.
I don’t know the song but we follow the music
to the commons area on campus. Wow! Jesus!
We’re entering a triumphant city of teeming
dreaming laughing feasting chatting napping
laying embracing dancing human beings.
We carry the coffins up on stage as the band plays
then lose ourselves among four thousand friends.
Everything real and imagined, everything I ever
doubted the existence of, everything inside me
blows out in inexhaustible fire in a billion directions.
I am at home everywhere.

published 5/29/2009 at counterpunch.org

A Vegan Devil's Online Dating Dictionary

2010-12-05T08:30:00.000-08:00

I'd like to offer a few tips about vegetarian and left wing dating sites, especially to my fellow vegans.

Credit card in hand, you're ready to open yourself up to the universe of online dating. Almost immediately you get hit with a really low blow: years ago, before this great thing -- the internet -- came along, when you had your back turned, somebody married you! Bummer! This typical rookie mistake can be remedied by not putting your picture on your ad and writing text that ranges from vague to barefaced lies and (a personal favorite) listing several cities that you live in and jet between. Just keep it a little consistent and plausible -- don't put "Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo and Big Bone Lick, Kentucky."

Conversely, if you really are single, you can capture the feeling of having an affair by forgetting what and how much you've told several people. You get the lies and finagling and maybe even the guilt but without any of the sex! Online dating involves very little "meeting" in the 20th century sense. It's mostly about something I've always been really lousy at -- typing.

Now you are ready. Here are the basic rules:

If they say they take in no food at all or only water, they might be vegan. If they say they are vegan it means they eat dairy. If they say they eat dairy it means they eat sea creatures. If they say they eat fish it means they eat anything. If they say they are "almost vegetarian" it means they slaughter animals like Buffalo Bill and Ray Kroc. If they say they eat a "balanced diet" it means that twenty minutes into the first phone call they will reveal a troubling history of cannibalism. And don't forget the "doorway" rule: "I'm a vegan -- except when I'm out of the house."

Believe it or not, fellow vegans, many people on veggie dating sites have never scoured food labels for "calcium caseinate." Many of the folks on veg dating sites are there just like they are on every other dating site whether it's match.com or blooddrinkingsingles4u.com. They want to meet somebody, anybody. Even troublesome vegans. That's how hard up people are out there.

Here are some key phrases, decoded, from personal ads.

"Must be okay with dog sleeping on bed." Dog is never a Pekinese. Dog is always the size of a llama.

"Not much of a partyer." Les White Flours du Mal. White bread. A human freakbat who can't locate the beat in "Mambo No. 5."

"I want to live off-grid." A rugged imaginary individualist quitter, too alienated to join others in overthrowing capitalism. Believes capitalism will leave him/her alone even though Arctic Circle polar bears, with DDT in their livers, strongly disagree. Has a pocketful of flip social change: "Heads, I love the earth -- tails, I hate people." Computer and internet OK till the beloved turns up.

"I believe in two people working on the relationship." Neither a round hole nor a square peg, he/she is of undetermined, shape-shifting geometry and you'll soon discover you're now working an extra job.

"Love me, love my llamas." Could we liberate those llamas, say, back to the Andes?

"Seeking the last piece of the puzzle." The beloved won't be making any changes or sacrifices to make this relationship work -- you will. And bet your life, if you have one, it still won't work. Usually preceded by: "I have a great job, great family, great friends, great llamas."

"I'm into Native American spirituality." A no-sweat lodge just down the road from the casinos and gas rigs. A beautiful refuge of smoke and mirrors where the Pasty Tribe goes to feel good about buying dead animals from the grocery. AKA the Clan of the Weak Asses. Also: A Lick and a Prayer.

"I recycle." See also: "I brush my teeth." Fun fact: The Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition and the Basel Action Network say that 80% of material dropped off by Americans at community recycling events is exported overseas. Chinese children strip out the guts of junked computers from America and the chromium, tin and barium goes straight into the rivers. Requiring American recycling companies to dispose of e-waste safely is treasonous because it cuts into profits. Now you wouldn't want to be a traitor to capitalism, wouldja? Wouldja... punk?

"Me: Degreed professional, web designer, life coach, artist, old soul, loves to travel, fit, active, attractive, small business owner (chakra grooming service). You: financially stable, unencumbered by debt, children, cacti and any other living thing. No cancer! No whiners! Must be willing to relocate to Alpha Centauri. You're probably a Libra (no Capricorns!) I'm very busy. Don't despair if I don't get back right away. Namaste." A lifetime membership.

"I'm the kind of person who thinks outside the box." What the bloody hell are you talking about? If I find out what that box is, and where it is, you're going back in it.

"Great body." Agreed, but what sick bastard grafted that head onto it?

"Green." Common sense from the 1960s, probably traceable back to Ben Franklin. Little points of light in the darkness that have flourished into little points of light in the darkness of the new millennium. Mostly meaningless individual acts on the consumption end of capitalism where there's scant impact rather than the production end, possible only under socialism, where impacts would be gigantic. Scrupulously, safely and sadly within the bounds of capitalist plunder, murder, injustice, insanity and waste.

Contrast "green" and "new age" with what might be called the bloody "red" of the "dark" ages. Events like the Boston Tea Party, the French Revolution and the Battle of Gettysburg aren't really popular with the "centered" and spiritual among us because these discordant events weren't win-win situations. After all, property rights and "space" were violated, perfectly good organic tea was wastefully dumped in a harbor, brothers killed each others' inner child at Gettysburg and some people in France had their mind/body integration sharply (hopefully) curtailed. With the advantage of "behindsight" (seeing the world through American capitalism's reactionary ass), it's obvious that these grunts and losers weren't very evolved or enlightened. And they probably weren't "financially stable" either. Maybe there's a lesson there.

Now get happy and get typing!

published 1/29/2007 at dissidentvoice.org

Somewhere Down the Izzy River

2010-12-05T08:20:00.000-08:00

Annexing the Pennsylvania "Terrortories"

(Press Conference with President Bush)

Reporter A: Mr. President, last year the American Council of Rabbinical Hydrologists concluded that a previously unknown biblical text proved that God gave "the land of the three rivers" to the Jews. The council further determined that these three rivers were the Allegheny, the Monongahela and the Ohio Rivers. In recent months, Jewish settlers have begun to establish "facts on the ground" at Fallingwater, Kennywood Amusement Park and, most controversially, the Pittsburgh Pirates' PNC Park. What's the administration's policy on western Pennsylvania?

Bush: Israel has the right to defend herself. I know that the moms and dads of Pittsburgh have some concerns about our strategy of victory in western Pennsylvania. But they have to understand that strengthening Israel helps bring stability and peace to the region.

Reporter B: Mr. President, Pirate fans believe it isn't fair for Jewish settler trailers to be popping up near the bullpens. Longtime season ticket holders say that every night after the game the foul lines get erased and moved, more and more trailers appear and the playing field gets smaller. It's harder to hit home runs, they say, and the games are much lower scoring. Attendance is down. Radical extremists, taking advantage of the situation to tell the truth, say that the fans are being "cleansed" from the ballpark. Groundskeepers report that every morning they have to tear down a confusing array of barriers and razor wire which seem intended to separate fans from the concession areas.

Bush: America will not be held hostage by any special interest groups. As far as low-scoring games go, the Pirates are adjusting to a post 9/11 world -- they're playing better defense.

Reporter C: Are you concerned that the situation may be spiraling out of control? Last week a Pittsburgh little league team renamed itself from the Southside Sluggers to the Holy Christ Mujahideen and one of those dads you spoke of, who manages the team, said, quote, "I never saw a Jew camping out in the Pirates' bullpen before, here, or at the old Three Rivers Stadium. And I've been to every home game in the last 25 years. First, we were told that we stole the land from the Indians and now they tell us that we stole it from the Jews. Where's the white man's world, that's what I want to know?"

Reporter D: And what about those out of work steelworkers in the bleachers who threw empty beer cans at the settlers' trailers last week? The settlers opened up on them and killed seven and wounded 12 others during the Cincy doubleheader.

Bush: Peace is hard work, especially when there's no peace partners in those bleachers.

Reporter E: Yeah, and then the steelworkers escalated and started throwing rocks. And the Pirate street is restive -- a common cry is: "Where is the next great pan-baseballer? Where is a Roberto Clemente to throw out the Jews for stealing 'home'"? As Wolf Blitzer asked last Sunday, "What can America do, realistically, about this cauldron of ancient hatreds?"

Bush: If there's a question in there somewhere, I'm not going looking for it.

Reporter F: Mr. President, is there any chance that the steelworkers could open up a can of kosher whup-ass on the settlers like Hezbollah did on Israel?

Bush: If they didn't riot for their jobs, why would they riot for their baseball?

Reporter G: Are you disturbed about the Jewish-only "bypass inclines" that the Israelis are building alongside the Monongahela Incline. Isn't this segregation -- separate and unequal?

Bush: Freedom is on the march. If Israel wants to improve the American transportation system, and get people up and down a mountain faster, who are we to interfere? It's called initiative and privatization. If it's good enough for the West Bank, it's good enough for us. Israel's airline has never had a hijacking... I'm not expecting their inclines to get hijacked or attacked either. We can learn a lot from our friend Israel. This is like the ruckus about the Dubai Ports deal. People need to understand that xenophobia is disgraceful when it blows out the candle of freedom -- and by that I mean the freedom for people with money to make more money.

Reporter H: There have also been border skirmishes at the Warhol Museum, resulting in damage to some of the art inside. The Warhol Museum director claims that the Department of Homeland Security slights the Warhol compared to Fallingwater. The director decries your refusal to call back the Pennsylvania National Guard from Venezuela. He publicly humiliated you by putting in a call to Hezbollah to protect the museum. Sheik Nasrallah declined and gave a televised three-hour speech which illuminated his thoughts on pop art and electrified the Islamic world. What's your response?

Bush: I've told every single person in the world -- I've knocked on every hut, every door, every cave, with the same message: supporting a terrorist group makes you a terrorist. The enemies of America can't hide in America or pretend that they are real Americans just because they were born here. 9/11 changed everything. Whether it's Saddama bin Laden or Osamadinejad, we will stay focused and bring the 9/11 killers to justice.

Reporter I: Some Pirate fans have noticed almost imperceptible changes in PNC Park, like images of the pirate being replaced with ones of Moshe Dayan. Is it wrong for fans to be worried about this?

Bush: I wish people wouldn't worry so much, but what can I do?

Reporter J: Was it wrong for Prof. Alan Dershowitz to call for that little league coach to be waterboarded until he gave up everything he had on the former Southside Sluggers?

Bush: If my enemy's back was against the wall, if they were shackled and hung, if they were drowned or burned, if they were beaten and raped or electrocuted, if they were naked and hooded and down on their knees and begging for their lives, or just plain killed, and I needed somebody to torture the Geneva Conventions for me, it would be Prof. Dershowitz.

Reporter J: A follow-up, sir: Why doesn't the Pittsburgh Police Department simply remove the illegal settlers from the PNC bullpen?

Reporter A: Anti-Semite!

Reporter D: Holocaust-minimizer!

Reporter L: What a waste of a question!

Bush: No, no, I'd like to answer that. I remind the world that the Military Commissions Act of 2006 is now the supreme law of the land and by land I mean the entire earth. It supersedes the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights. It eliminates habeas corpus. Yes, you can have your guns and your vocalizations but if I choose to kidnap and hold you without charge and torture you, and use the statements that I get out of you against you, well, you get the idea of how free you are. The whole world -- the whole universe, in fact -- is a battlefield and I can declare anyone anywhere a terrorist whether they're in Beijing or Poughkeepsie. One day, it will be possible for a President to sit in the Oval Office and shoot a laser from space down at anyone anywhere in the world who is interfering with freedom. Now, to your point, in the Military Commissions Act there is a passage about protecting the interests of our allies like Israel. Those fine men and women of the Pittsburgh Police Department understand the new realities. They don't want to run afoul of the Act and end up in some black hole any more than you do. 9/11 changed everything -- boundaries and borders don't mean anything. In the post-9/11 world, there is a seamless web between the cop at the protest, the soldier near the oil well and our CIA interrogators roaming the earth, all working together to eliminate terrorists. I'm the King of the World now and the Lord God of Torture. I'm the most powerful creature who ever walked the earth. Too bad there aren't some dinosaurs around -- I'd show those ugly green bastards too. God told me to invade Iraq, but I swear I feel like God myself, so possessed am I of the Holy Spirit. I can kidnap, torture and slaughter any person anywhere on earth at a time and place of my choosing -- and the world can hold its breath. You, yourself, exist at my pleasure -- and you're not making me very happy, hehehe.

Reporter B: Sir, will there be enough time today to talk about existential threats to Israel?

Bush: Now that's a waste of a question. You know we only do that on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays -- and today is Tuesday.

Reporter K: Sen. Santorum is calling for sanctions on the Pirates and an embargo which could ban so-called "dual-use" items like ball bats. The fear is that the bats could be used to terrorize Jewish settlers in what was once left field. Should Americans get used to playing baseball without bats or can there be a compromise to satisfy Israel's need for security? Sen. Hagel recently wondered whether the Republicans could win the upcoming elections if they were perceived as being more pro-matzoh ball than pro-baseball. Lastly, how many Muslims need to be killed before Americans can feel safe like we did before 9/11?

Bush: It's so hard to tell. We have people studying this all the time. I'd hate to give some number, alarm folks and then find out that it wasn't enough.

Reporter L: A member of the Israeli Knesset has called you the "greatest Arab killer in Israel's history." How do you feel about that?

Bush: I'm humbled, of course. But I point out that leaders in the modern era, like myself, have advantages in equipment, training and nutrition that Hall-of-Famers like Ben-Gurion never had.

Reporter M: Nutrition -- are you referring to performance-enhancing drugs?

Bush: No, no, I mean we have the ability to confine and starve people, put them on a really good diet, on a really big scale now.

Reporter N: What is the origin of your strong feelings for Israel?

Bush: Well, I was watching the 1972 Munich Olympics on TV when those terrorists killed the Israeli athletes. Before this, I didn't know anything about Jews or Arabs, or Shiite from shinola. It was then I had my revelation: even though Israel was minding its own business, Arabs were so unpredictable that they could wake up from a sound sleep one morning and just start hating freedom and democracy and Jews. It was only after I became a born-again Christian that I could forgive those Arabs for ruining my sports-viewing pleasure. The Munich Olympics was the 9/11 of its day.

Reporter O: There's a rumor that the Rabbinical Hydrologists will rename the three rivers. Is that right?

Bush: My understanding from the experts in Israel proper -- and by that I mean the Israel over there, not the Israel over here --is that the three rivers will go back to their original Hebrew names. I've been told that the rivers will be much easier to pronounce. We shouldn't be afraid of change. It may be as simple as calling them the Morty, the Seymour, and the Joan Rivers. You'll see, one day I'll be vinundated. Someday you'll all be singing "Somewhere Down the Izzy River."

Reporter P: Can you really risk offending Ohio's swing voters by changing the river's name?

Bush: I've directed Secretary of State Rice to negotiate a separate peace between Ohio and Israel, a two-name one-river solution that lets Ohioans call the river by its old name and keeps the signage once the river passes west near Cincinnati.

Reporter Q: But isn't that a lousy deal for Ohioans -- the river is essentially beyond Ohio by that point -- they won't really have a river will they?

Bush: The river's not going anywhere and if Ohioans want to jump in it, they can. We have to be realistic. After all these many months, facts on the ground have been established in the Pennsylvania terrortories. I can't change history.

Reporter R: Did you ever foresee that so many American Jews would stand side by side with your deer-slaying, Arab-hating, immigrant-blaming, race-baiting, gay-bashing, anti-science, know-nothing base?

Bush: No, but Karl Rove, the "Wizard of Odds," did.

Reporter S: Your base has always been pretty conspiracy-friendly and mistrustful of government. Do you worry that these folks -- because of the need to explain 9/11 as an inside government job, or simply a notoriously short attention span -- will lose interest in hating Arabs and go back to what they know, go back to their historical comfort of hating and blaming Jews for everything? Or, are their hearts big enough to hate everybody?

Bush: I question the respect of your premise. We only want the American people to hate terrorists -- and they have more choices, colors, selections and worldwide availability from 1.5 billion Muslims. The Muslims are putting up Communist-sized numbers.

Reporter T: Mr. President, I hate to bring up the "Der Beagle" incident again but many people around the world are still confused about one thing that you said in the Der Spiegle interview. Everyone accepts that there was a mix-up between you and the White House staff about the name of the publication and the nature of the questions. But right after you opened with telling the Der Spiegle reporter about a favorite hunting dog you once had, he asked if the US plans on ever leaving Iraq. Perhaps still assuming that this was an outdoor publication, you said, "Does the Pope shit in the woods?" This Zen-like answer troubled a lot of people around the world. Many people were shocked that you believe the Pope would be capable of taking a dump, especially on God's creation. Was this just a way of saying "Are bears Catholic?" Could you clarify this?

Bush: I was misquoted. What I said was: Islamic fascism is a greater threat to the world than Hitler or Stalin.

Reporter C: Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Thomas Friedman has lauded you as a "Catcher In The Rye" kind of guy, one who's trying to save the world. Do you agree?

Bush: Well, I consulted with Laura about that book and I believe that's a fair estimate. I'm trying to save freedom everywhere, I'm trying to save the Iraqi children for freedom. I'm creating a glorious world.

Reporter U: Could you share your thoughts on the recent killings involving a Christian militia at Fallingwater? The militia mistook a Jain tourist group from India for Arabs. The Jains ran away but were shot in the back when they stopped to remove some grasshoppers from a paved parking lot and put them back onto the grass.

Bush: Yeah, people like those Jain tourerists aren't going to make it in this world. When I hear about things like that I almost believe in evolution.

Reporter U: Could sectarian violence, a la Iraq, ever happen in America?

Bush: Allah Iraq? What's your problem? Of course that won't happen here.

Reporter U: What makes you so sure, Mr. President?

Bush: Because in America all the right people have most of the guns. The wrong people know that if they ever get too far out of line and interfere with freedom that they'll be cleaned up on in about a month or two.

Reporter U: So it will be a cakewalk?

Bush: Yeah, something like that.

Reporter V: Mr. President, a follow-up question on the Jains: Does the Jain ideology of "dynamic harmlessness" pose any threat to America?

Bush: To be honest, I'm not familiar with that term but I will say that our government has all the tools it needs to deal with whatever that is. Non-state actors like the Jains need to know that they will be held to account. What goes around comes around. I saw that Jain preacher man on TV, you know, with the rats running around his temple and I said to myself, "That's a religion that needs Dick Cheney and Tom DeLay."

Reporter V: Mr. President, there's no indication that the Jains are terrorists. Their most well-known belief seems to be that of not hurting animals.

Bush: I knew they hated our values! I don't have to know the details about something to know that I'm right about it. There's still so much freedom that needs spread in the world.

Reporter W: Mr. President, some people are saying that we're making the same mistakes in Greater Greater Israel, the Pennsylvania "terrortories," as you call them, that we made in Iraq. I refer to paying vast sums of money to shady or desperate people for unreliable information. For instance, a Christian militia wouldn't be guarding the shrine of Fallingwater were it not for the bogus tip from that Syrian small businessman, the failed hamster breeder Ahkmed Schulubbi. This man fed the CIA a little known online magazine, Architectural Jihadjest, with this fatal line -- fatal for those Jain tourists: "Fallingwater, aka Fallingdownwater, is a claustrophobic, cold, muggy, dumpy, fucking ugly piece of capitalist hubris ... may the God of style, peace be upon him, smite it down." Other than this critique there appears to be no plan, no weapons, indeed, no people to actually smite Fallingwater and yet because of this, the Department of Homeland Security funded a Christian militia to guard it twenty-four hours a day. They diverted the entire stream that runs under the house, for fear of waterborne poisons and rubber ducky IEDs, and put up twelve foot concrete blast walls and planters, albeit in the "Prairie" style. Should taxpayers be paying Christian militias 50 times as much as you could get for a Mexican roofing crew?

Bush: OK, I'm not happy with this. In the world we're trying to create, we could match those roofers with more urgent unmet American needs... We could turn the Mexicans into instant Quaker Oats Minutemen... We could screen those roofers right at the border to see who's good with a gun and who believes in the Rapture and get some faith-based dollars in their hands and send them on their way to the nearest Christian militia -- all for NAFTA prices. I have a theory of freedom and it's magical: freedom warms the hearts of normal people but it burns the asses of terrorists.

Reporter W: But does this militarizing of everything really work in the real world, does it get the results that we want? I ask because, after the Jain family was slain, the 75 year-old leader of the Jains issued a first of its kind fatwa, saying, in part, "For every time there is a season and it's now open season on that bastard Bush." Previously, no one had ever heard this man raise his voice.

Bush: How big's his air force? Maybe he'd like some vitamin B-52.

Reporter X: The head of Israel's Shin Bet security service says that there's now a Sandlot Crescent forming in Pennsylvania, from the Pirates in the west to the Phillies in the east. Shin Bet estimates that, within six months, there will be more terrorists in Breezewood than hotel rooms. Local proprietors like Mater Patel, Paneer Patel, Aloo Patel and Hamhock Patel, all unrelated, are alarmed at the loss of business caused by Shin Bet's comment and, coincidentally, Israeli businessmen buying up hotels in nearby cities. The Patels issued this statement: "So long as the terrorists/Pirates pay their bills and don't blow us up, it's cricket. We will talk with them as brothers about the infield fly rule but they should not bring up Kashmir or the disputes in the PNC Park bullpen." Given all this, should Americans stay overnight in Breezewood anymore?

Bush: You know, I have a question for you: Are any of those Patels related? Are they all related? This has kept me up a lot of nights. Laura found me a book, "The Genealogy of Super 8 Owners, Volume Seven" but I haven't had a chance to read it yet. It's huge -- it must be 300 pages long -- you can't run through it like a PDB.

Reporter Y: Mr. President, filmmaker Steven Spielberg is making a documentary about the settlers and their struggles to live in peace in the PNC Park bullpen. In the film the settlers claim to be making the bullpen "bloom" but so far, besides the trailers, there's only a knish stand and a couple Caterpillar bulldozers. Do you plan on seeing the movie?

Bush: Yes. In fact, I'm in it. I have a cameo, what's called in the business a "walked-on" role.

Reporter Z: Polls show that the nation is extremely polarized between the people who dislike you and the people who really hate you. What do you say to that?

Bush: I'd say that I'm not playing "gotcha" today or any other day. Thank you very much.

published 10/31/2006 at dissidentvoice.org

God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen

2010-12-05T07:41:00.000-08:00

At a loading dock this week, I was blasting one of my "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" discs (I've got about 50 different versions of the song) and another driver inquired, "What the fuck is that -- Christmas is over!"

But the spirit remains. For me and the merry gentlemen, any day can be Christmas. Agnostic me will sing out "Christ our Savior was born upon this day" and feel my being transported skyward to... well, at least the top of my van. Here are my favorite versions:

1) Chuck Leavell (What's in That Bag? 1998)
So you're walking through snowy woods on a winter night and you see lit candles here and there on the ground. You hear music. You come to a small clearing ablaze with thousands of candles and there is the great Chuck Leavell, formerly of the Allman Brothers, sometimes of the Rolling Stones, formerly of Chuck Leavell, the great Chuck Leavell sitting alone at a 30 foot grand in the snow and he's powerful, free, inspired, but he's not playing for you or even himself -- he's playing for the Great Mystery. My all-time favorite. Turn it up all the way.

2) Gypsy Soul (Sacred, 1998)
Multi-instrumentalist husband Roman Morykit lays down a little bluesy, lot jazzy acoustic delight and every sound out of vocalist wife Cilette Swann's mouth is perfection.

3) Yellowjackets (Peace Round -- A Christmas Celebration, 2004)
Saxman Bob Mintzer, pianist Russ Ferrante, drummer Marcus Baylor and bassist Jimmy Haslip show their chops and give their props in the most free-flowing engrossing jazz ensemble investigation of the merry gentlemen.

4) Nancy Wilson (A Nancy Wilson Christmas, 2001)
The underclass of the 1300s -- just about everybody back then -- couldn't get down with somber church music, so they invented carols which were sung and danced to year-round. "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" was sung on London street corners at least as far back as the 1500s. Five hundred years later Nancy Wilson gave us this sexy version.

A digression... As many of you know, there's a bitter schism in the world of Christmas caroling concerning where to put the comma in the song. As with most issues, the controversy is between the idiots and the smart people. The correct placing of the comma is: "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen" (not: "God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen") because in olden days "rest" meant "keep." The gents were advised to be merry, not rest. A red-state reading of Nancy Wilson's outstanding horn-heavy version would say: "Sit your asses (and oxen and sheepen) down, merry pardners, and take a load off." A blue-stater might say: "Gentlemen, get ready for the wisest hottest comforting and joy of your lives."

5) Eric Loy (Counterpoint Guitar Solos, 1999)
Way under-known self-taught guitarzan, aggressive, percussive, uninhibited, fun, joyous -- Loy puts the "merry" in this sweet swinging take. See Loy play live, with his harp guitar (two necks, three holes, 24 strings), and pick your jaw up off the floor.

6) Philadelphia Brass Ensemble (A Festival of Carols in Brass, 1986)
First issued in 1967 (but seemingly forever in the aether), this is the real deal, the version imprinted on us when we children were first dragged around on cold December nights to go "shopping" and "visiting." Effortlessly bringing tears to the eyes and shivers to the spine, this brief take (1:07) conjures up the best of the season: the cold huddled masses, the absent dead, love lost. The theme song for Seasonal Affective Disorder. Only three more months to go!

7) Crash Test Dummies (Jingle All the Way, 2002)
Rocker Brad Roberts' basso hilarious vocal unexpectedly gives way to fab flute and jazz. Totally enjoyable.

8) MercyMe (The Christmas Sessions, 2005)
The Christian rockers' photo on the album cover tells the tale: eyes peering out between toboggan hats and scarves across their mouths -- tough-sledding Christian insurgents! (Like Bruce Cockburn, I'm wondering where the rocket launchers are... or something like that.) A bonafide over-the-top warchestra with pulverizing drums, a choir and frighteningly earnest singing. Music to smite Shiites (Sunni or later) and steal hydrocarbons by. We (USA) rock -- you (world) roll (over).

Briefly: people of goodwill everywhere can agree to hate the kudzu of smooth jazz, but do check out Johnny Kudzuseed's (Russ Freeman) salsa version (Holiday, 1995). David Grisman doesn't have the exclusive bluegrass franchise (see also Christmas Grass Too, 2004) but he has done two superlative bluejass versions (DGQ-20, 1996 and David Grisman's Acoustic Christmas, 1991). Speaking of grass, have a listen to A Most Excellent Reggae Christmas, 2005. (Jah rest ye mellow, gentlemon?)

published 1/28/2006 at counterpunch.org